Free Republic

The Economist magazine warns this week of the “growing peril” of a national conservatism that is spreading like wildfire around the planet. National conservatism is “dangerous and it’s spreading,” The Economist intones forebodingly in this week’s cover story. “Liberals need to find a way to stop it.” The cover features a red MAGA cap stretched vertically to fit a slew of nations following the lead of American populism: “Make America, Hungary, Italy, France, Israel, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland great again.” Image Today, Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, and “a motley crew of Western politicians” have constructed “a statist, ‘anti-woke’ conservatism that...

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) called on Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley to honor his word and stop dodging questions about allegations in Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s book Peril that he usurped President Donald Trump’s power as commander in chief after the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, in violation of the law.Grassley and Banks both spoke Thursday on the floors of the Senate and House respectively to remind Milley he told members of Congress he would review the allegations in the book and get back to them to say...

So many times we were left shaking our heads during the Trump Administration, wondering who in his Cabinet could be trusted. We saw many of their deeds as unpatriotic or deeply questionable. We were shocked to learn earlier this week that Gen Mark Milley, JCOS chairman, has admitted in an upcoming book titled “Peril,” that he had back channels with his Chinese counterpart in case President Trump pulled some rogue maneuver following the stolen 2020 election. Today, Trump’s former Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, rode to Milley’s defense, tweeting that the “White Rage Woke” Milley is a “person of impeccable integrity...

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) reportedly told former President Trump, "You f'd up your presidency" earlier this year when attempting to advise him to accept that he lost the 2020 presidential election. This apparent bit of hard truth from the South Carolina Republican was shared on Sunday by renowned Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward while he was discussing his new book, "Peril," on NBC's "Meet the Press." Host Chuck Todd asked Woodward and co-author and fellow Post reporter Robert Costa how they would characterize the attitude Graham and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows had towards Trump's refusal to...

Panetta, a private citizen, admits he was in on Milley's subversive phone call with Chinese Communist Party military behind former President Trump's back.Former Obama administration Defense Secretary Leon Panetta appeared to admit that he was involved with General Mark Milley’s secret phone calls to Communist China behind President Trump’s back.Panetta claimed to The Hill on Sunday that Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Milley’s first phone call to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) military warning them if they’d attack had the approval of the Pentagon. “The first phone call was pursuant to the approval of [Defense] Secretary [Mark] Esper, and I...

Former Attorney General William Barr warned former President Donald Trump he would lose the 2020 election months before the contest because suburban voters viewed him as a "f***ing a**hole," a forthcoming book claims.

General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, prevented Donald Trump from invoking the Insurrection Act against Black Lives Matter during their 2020 riots. Milley, according to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s new book, ‘Peril,’ drastically minimized the riots to Trump, suggesting that they were mostly centered upon the use of “spray paint.” Despite the violent protests spreading across the country like wildfire, Milley insisted that they had only impacted two cities and were peaceful, echoing CNN’s absurd description of the riots as “fiery, but most peaceful.” “They used spray paint, Mr. President, that’s not an insurrection. […]...

The embattled Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, confirmed that he held secretive talks with China amid major political events in the United States. According to the forthcoming book “Peril” by Bob Woodward and Bob Costa, the general made two calls to Chinese general Li Zuocheng. The first of the unauthorized phone calls, made four days prior to the 2020 election, indicated that Milley would give advance warning to China in the event of a military attack, including a nuclear attack.“One call took place on Oct. 30, 2020, four days before the election that unseated President...

You can’t help but watch human beings and be amazed, sometimes. No other creature has done such incredible or compassionate things. We’ve cured diseases, freed our fellow humans, and gone to the moon and back. Our potential as a species is unlimited. Other times, however, some of our fellow humans are the dumbest group of creatures next to the brainless starfish. These are some examples from the latter in just the last few weeks. Friday was the 19th anniversary of the September 11th terror attacks and “never forget” has turned into “we forgot.” The heroes of that horrible day are...

Former Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell is pouring cold water on new reporting from Bob Woodward, detailed in the Washington Post Tuesday, that General Mark Milley vowed to give China a heads up if President Donald Trump ordered an attack. He's also dismissing calls from Alexander Vindman, the "whistleblower" behind Trump's first impeachment over a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, for Milley to resign. From the Washington Post's reporting on Woodward's book: In the book’s account, Milley went so far as to pledge he would alert his counterpart in the event of a U.S. attack, stressing...

The headline stories today are large, and so is the background as these issues surface. Context becomes increasingly important as each aspect is reviewed. As you look at the stories, remember this context (emphasized as a reminder): ♦ TEAM One – The Department of State is aligned with the CIA. Their media PR firms are CNN, CNNi and the Washington Post. Their ideology is favorable to the United Nations. Their internal corruption is generally driven by relationship with foreign actors. References: Hillary Clinton, Clinton Global Initiative, John McCain, Qatar, Muslim Brotherhood, Samantha Powers, Susan Rice, Cass Sunstein, Brookings Institute, Lawfare,...

In the First Book of Samuel which we are reading now in daily Mass, we see are rather stunning portrait of poor parenting and poor priestly leadership in the person of of High Priest of the Sanctuary at Shiloh, Eli. Consider this line from the Scriptures: Samuel was sleeping in the temple of the LORD where the ark of God was. The LORD called to Samuel, who answered, “Here I am.” Samuel ran to Eli and said, “Here I am. You called me.”“I did not call you,” Eli said. “Go back to sleep.” …..At that time Samuel was not familiar...

Madison - State election officials say they likely will need extra time to review recall signatures even though Gov. Scott Walker has said he will not challenge the petitions against him - a move that would give Walker more time to raise unlimited sums of money. Meanwhile, Republican legislators groused Wednesday that the Government Accountability Board was not doing a thorough enough analysis of the signatures even as it was asking them for $975,000 to do its work. "It just seems like they are doing the bare minimum but not enough to instill confidence in the system," said Rep. Robin...

As the early ’70s repeat themselves with the chaotic Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in lower Manhattan, we need to grasp what a peril this movement is to President Obama and the entire Democratic Party. It is like the Obama campaign run wild without Obama in it. It is as if the bandwagon has taken off and left the president behind. And he and his party are racing to catch up. “There go my followers,” they seem to be saying, “and I must go with them because I am their leader.” Just as the civil rights movement of the late ’50s...

As America this weekend celebrates the birth of its liberty, in much of the rest of the world freedom and democracy are in retreat. Over the past decade, authoritarian rulers have refined their techniques to stay in power, learning from each other and thinking two steps ahead of democratic forces. Unprepared for this systematic reply to the advance of democracy from the 1970s through the 1990s, democratic governments have yet to formulate a coherent response. "A global political recession" is how Tom Melia describes the current state of affairs. Melia is deputy director of Freedom House, a nonprofit that annually...

The rapidly expanding environmental catastrophe caused by the oil spill off the coast of Louisiana is presenting a growing political challenge to the Obama White House, with Mr. Obama and his aides at pains to defend the response and forestall comparisons to the Hurricane Katrina crisis. Nine days after British Petroleum's Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew apart and began spewing 5,000 barrels of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico, a massive oil slick is set to wash ashore on the southern coast Thursday evening and, experts say, could dwarf the damage caused by the Exxon Valdez oil spill...

MASSACHUSETTS is a long way from Australia. Even so, you can count on the Rudd government paying close attention to what happened in the Bay State last week. A little known Republican, Scott Brown, won the Senate election by campaigning against the US President's radical healthcare plan. Massachusetts is sacred Democrat turf, held by the Kennedy clan for more than 40 years and by Democrats since 1952. It was the only state to vote for George McGovern over Richard Nixon in 1972. Barack Obama's overreach on health care has plenty in common with Kevin Rudd's dogged pursuit of an emissions...

A former Holly High School music teacher accused of having sex with two students was sentenced to jail Wednesday and barred from most unsupervised contact with minors. Ranee Sue Proper hugged supporters before facing Oakland Circuit Judge Edward Sosnick, who sentenced her to five years probation, with the first nine months of that in Oakland County Jail. The judge also ordered her to participate in sex offender treatment and not to have any unsupervised contact with minors under 18 other than her own children and relatives’ children.

'We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California,' Steven Chu says. He sees education as a means to combat threat. Reporting from Washington -- California's farms and vineyards could vanish by the end of the century, and its major cities could be in jeopardy, if Americans do not act to slow the advance of global warming, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said Tuesday.

PARIS (AFP) – A cold front is sweeping across Europe after gripping swathes of North America last month, but the deep freeze does not mean the threat of global warming has abated, caution scientists. "The major trend is unmistakably one of warming," Michel Jarraud, secretary general of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), told AFP. "If we look at the trajectory over the last 160 years, it overlays a large natural variability, and that's what causes confusion." The cooler weather that was a hallmark of 2008 can be explained partly by La Nina, a reversal of the phenomenon by which warm...