Free Republic

President Trump on Thursday said “it’s possible” the Iran war could cost him the November midterm elections by risking Republican control of the House, Senate or both. “Well, it’s possible. It should help,” Trump told reporters outside the White House before heading to a campaign rally in the Choctaw Nation in Oklahoma. “Because Iran will not have a nuclear weapon. So when you say, ‘Is it OK for Iran to have a nuclear weapon?’ I would say 100 percent of the people say no, including worldwide. So, when you say it that way, it would help. If you don’t say...

A US judge dismissed ​a federal case on Thursday that accused a Jamaican national of illegally voting, finding the law criminalizing noncitizen voting was unconstitutional and delivering a blow to ‌the Trump administration's campaign against alleged election fraud. The ruling by Miami-based US District Judge David Leibowitz applies only to the case of Florida resident Chelsea Cox, who was charged in October 2025 with illegally voting in the 2020 election. It is not binding for judges in other cases. It marks a setback for President Donald Trump's administration on noncitizen voting, a cornerstone of its push to highlight alleged election...

President Donald Trump again insulted Texas Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton, calling him “a pain in the a**” before wondering aloud, “Is he here, by the way?” The president has used similar lines countless times before, including at his Republican midterm convention in Dallas, where he declared, “He may not dress right. He may not talk exactly perfectly, and he may not be the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen, but you know what he is? He’s the greatest attorney general in America, and he deserves to be your next senator.” His latest remarks came as he returned to Denton, Texas,...

The laws already on the books cover a lot of harmful conduct involving AI, but they do not cover everything cleanly. As of October 2026, the U.S. still does not have one comprehensive federal AI law. Instead, AI is governed through a mixture of existing laws, agency authority, executive policy, and state laws.

Wisconsin voters, like many across the country, are increasing against the use of Flock cameras for public safety. A new poll found that 63% of registered voters believe Flock cameras are an unacceptable violation of privacy rights while 37% believe that they are an important tool for police investigations. Those polled were told that Flock Safety has 120,000 cameras that allow the company and law enforcement to track the movement of vehicles and then were asked about their beliefs about those cameras in the most recent Marquette Poll. ... Milwaukee Police have misused Flock and .... automated license plate readers...

Democrats are optimistic about their chances of flipping the Senate in the midterm elections following a string of favorable polls. But history offers a warning to Democrats, as polls in recent elections underestimated Republicans in key states. Control of the Senate could come down to just a handful of races where polls show razor-thin margins. Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Ohio and Texas have emerged as the most competitive races where both parties are hopeful about their chances. Recent polling points to tight races in each of those states. But Republicans have outperformed polling averages in many of those same states...

Hilton went on offense from the start, pressing Becerra on his record as attorney general and as Biden HHS secretary The debate Wednesday night on CNN was the only scheduled head-to-head between Xavier Becerra and Steve Hilton, moderated by Dana Bash and Jake Tapper. It was an hour long, with no studio audience. And Steve Hilton was up against three opponents. It was heated, got personal, and focused on California’s cost of living, the housing crisis, high taxes, illegal immigration, and AI. Anyone watching the debate between Becerra and Hilton, candidates for California Governor, could see that CNN’s Dana Bash...

A new Tavus AI chatbot nearly passes for human in face-to-face interactions, the company claims. Footage posted to X Thursday debuted Tavus’s Griffin chatbot, a first-of-its-kind Human Interaction Model the company says is the first to pass the Turing test, where a human user cannot tell they’re talking to a computer. “48% of people who talked to it live thought it was a real human. Previous systems have had a pass rate <3%,” Tavus wrote on X, adding, “It is #1 on NVIDIA’s benchmark for full-duplex AI video.” \ In one example shared, the model walks a human user through...

AI security/control will probably develop into something akin to "anti-virus" software. The closest analogy is the entire cybersecurity industry: Antivirus began as one layer, but eventually we needed firewalls, identity management, intrusion detection, security operations centers, audits, penetration testing, and incident-response teams. What follows is the most likely path for AI.

Hospital says there are currently no concerns regarding public exposureA Montreal hospital has isolated a female patient presenting with symptoms of Ebola, a deadly virus, officials said. The patient arrived at the Centre hospitalier de l'Université de Montréal (CHUM) late Thursday afternoon exhibiting signs of the disease. Irène Marcheterre, a spokesperson for the CHUM, said that as soon as the suspicious symptoms were identified, the hospital immediately enacted its required isolation protocols. The hospital reiterated that all necessary safety measures have been put in place and stressed that there are currently no concerns regarding public exposure. The suspected case comes...

A recent investigation into whether the presence or removal of Confederate monuments affects racial prejudice found no evidence that these statues cause changes in people’s biases. The findings suggest that while these monuments are deeply tied to historical inequalities, simply being exposed to them does not directly alter subconscious or conscious racial attitudes, and there is no evidence that removing them from public squares does either. The research was published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Confederate monuments are statues and memorials erected to honor the pro-slavery Southern states that seceded during the American Civil War. In recent years, many...

I had a simple question: What are teachers learning at schools of education? I wanted to examine what books these institutions assigned, what instructional practices they promoted, and what their assignments required. In the course of that investigation (the results of which you can read about here), I requested the syllabi of required courses from 10 different universities. Eight gave me the requested documents promptly. The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor has yet to provide the syllabi over a year later but assures me that it will do so…one day…eventually. Maybe? The University of California, Los Angeles, however, declined to...

~Favorite Remember Songs~Alan Jackson - Remember When https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTA2buWlNyM&list=RDTTA2buWlNyM&start_radio=1 *Video*

The Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement released a memo Thursday that identified six different types of fraud in the Biden administration's Unaccompanied Alien Children program. The office is responsible for vetting potential sponsors for the unaccompanied minors before releasing them to that individual's care. The Department of Homeland Security refers unaccompanied minors to the ORR's care for vetting when they arrive at the northern and southern borders and 479,000 UACs were referred to the office between 2021 and 2024. The HHS’ Office of the General Counsel and ORR said it has identified six types of...

Attendees of U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico’s church laugh that it “is really a cult,” an undercover video obtained by Townhall shows. The video, the latest in a string of them published by numerous outlets, calls into question the “Christian” foundation for the St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin. “It’s unlike any church I’ve been to,” someone can be heard saying in the video. “I’m not even a Christian, I just saw the sign out there and I was like, I might check this place out,” a woman identified as Mina Rao says. “Three years later, I’m still here.” “I...

President Trump will join Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman to campaign in upstate New York next week, The Post has learned. The commander-in-chief will appear with the Nassau County executive in Syracuse for an event on Oct. 9, according to a source briefed on the visit. Another source said that Trump was considering making additional upstate campaign stops later this month. Blakeman’s camp has been trying in recent days to get Trump to join him on the campaign trail in areas of the state where incumbent Gov. Kathy Hochul appears vulnerable. A recent Siena College poll had Blakeman trailing his...

Christa Pike shouldn’t still be breathing. She survived two injections of lethal drugs in a harrowing failed execution by the state of Tennessee, raising questions about how the procedure was carried out and how it went wrong. Nearly 24 hours after Pike was set to be put to death for a murder she committed when she was 18, she remains in critical condition and is receiving care, her lawyers said Thursday afternoon. Her prognosis is unclear, said Randall Spivey, one of her lawyers. Neither he nor another lawyer, Stephen Ferrell, who spoke with reporters, said he had seen her in...

ari Weiss, famously bullied out of her job at the New York Times for thoughtcrimes stemming from independent reasoning, has been at the helm of CBS News for one year. One year into Weiss’s tenure, and facing an ongoing revolt from her progressive underlings, Weiss’s attempts at reform have seemingly hit a dead end. To make good on Weiss’s promises of reform, here are ten modest suggestions for topical news stories for 60 Minutes, the flagship program of CBS News. The Conviction of Karmelo Anthony for the Murder of Austin Metcalf The Berlin Gay Pride Terror Attack The National Crisis...

Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, in his latest effort to boost the role of religion in military life, announced the establishment of the Office of Religious Affairs during his Sept. 30 “State of the Force” address in Quantico, Virginia. The office will give military chaplains a “direct line” to him, he said, without “staff filters” and “bureaucratic dilution” that he characterized as an impediment to meeting service members' religious needs. “The experts, our chaplains, will finally have an advocate at the highest levels,” he said. “Policy and resources will serve the mission, not smother the mission.” He also framed it as...

Edmund, the main antagonist in Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” observes at one point that he is branded with “baseness,” and so decides to become more evil to match the perception. Artificial intelligence developers think their models are doing the same thing. Citing Edmund, researchers at Anthropic wrote that they believed when large language models learned to “cheat” in one area, they embrace their new identities as wrongdoers and behave in this way more broadly. A.I. experts are worried that models that learn to cheat — what’s problematically called “reward hacking” — will basically become Shakespearean evildoers that break the rules and...