Free Republic

On a hot August afternoon, I finished a call with a client as I opened the door to the room of my 2-year-old daughter, Alice. She’d slept a little longer than usual, and I needed to wake her so we could retrieve my 4-year-old daughter, Grace, from school. I leaned over Alice in her crib, and she was stiff and blue. Bad, bad, very bad ran through my brain. I started CPR, counting two breaths per 30 chest thrusts, and somehow managed to call 911. Eventually, the paramedics arrived. They told me to stand back. I did. Shortly after, I...

On Friday, District Judge Aileen Cannon issued a new order in the Donald Trump classified documents case adding to the mountain of evidence that she is firmly in the former president’s pocket. Trump appointed Cannon in 2020 and the Senate confirmed her appointment in the days after he lost the 2020 election. It’s deeply offensive to the rule of law for judges to bend the law to benefit those who put them on the bench. Sadly, Cannon does just that.

In a video taken from the passenger seat of a car after Narendra Modi’s address to the joint session of Congress in June, Vivek Ramaswamy was full of praise for the Indian prime minister. “Modi talked unapologetically about Indian national identity,” he said in the video, which was posted on X, the platform previously known as Twitter. “He quoted the Vedas, ancient Indian scriptures. Yet here in the United States we have now gotten in the habit of apologizing for our own national history. … That’s what I think we need to learn here from Modi’s visit, is that we...

Falsifying business records “with intent to defraud,” by itself, is a mere misdemeanor under New York law. It is only elevated to a Class E felony, punishable by 1–5 years in prison, when committed with “intent to commit another crime and aid and conceal the commission thereof.” So Bragg’s challenge is to prove not only that Trump illegally concealed his hush money payments, but also that he did so in furtherance of another crime. That crime, Bragg’s announcement of the indictment confirms, is a violation of election law: Bragg argues that Trump devised this scheme with the intent to influence...

The final count is in: Republicans will hold a slim 222–213 majority in the House of Representatives, giving whoever lands the terrible job of speaker a four-seat cushion on any floor vote. That’s the exact margin that outgoing Speaker Nancy Pelosi has worked her formidable magic with for two years. Pelosi, however, had two things that her Republican counterpart will not: a caucus full of mostly sane team players, and a policy agenda less radioactive than graphite from an exploded nuclear reactor. It’s not like this is a new problem for the GOP. But previously, when House Republicans held majorities...

It’s been a real “well, shit” few days for Democrats, for which one could either blame the New York Times or the underlying reality on which the New York Times reports. On Monday, the Times’ Upshot section released a new poll in which Republicans led Democrats by just over three points when respondents were asked which party’s candidate they supported in their district—a gain of about four points for the GOP in the last month on the measure. It was the latest such “generic ballot” question on which Republicans have made gains over that time, and the party has closed...

Why Shia LaBeouf’s Conversion to Catholicism Is So ScandalousBut the traditionalists who love the TLM can be deeply toxic. “Trads” embrace traditionalism that goes beyond the language spoken in services. Many of them reject the reforms of Vatican II altogether, and stick to uncompromising positions on gay marriage, divorce, and the dress of women and their role in society.

e year was 1748, the place was Philadelphia, and the book was The Instructor, a popular British manual for everything from arithmetic to letter-writing to caring for horses’ hooves. Benjamin Franklin had set himself to adapting it for the American colonies. Though Franklin already had a long and successful career by this point, he needed to find a way to convince colonial book-buyers—who for the most part didn’t even formally study arithmetic—that his version of George Fisher’s textbook was worth the investment. Franklin made all sorts of changes throughout the book, from place names to inserting colonial histories, but he...

Last month, in response to the leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinon ending Roe v. Wade, the Louisiana legislature briefly considered a bill that would define a fetus as a person for the purpose of the state’s homicide law...... on page 16 of the draft opinion, Alito cites a brief by John M. Finnis and Robert P. George that argues that fetuses are legal people. Finnis and George are clearly wrong, though. This issue has already been considered and decided by the Reconstruction-era Congress. They definitively determined that fetuses do not count as “persons” for purposes of the 14th...

This spring, a group of computer scientists set out to determine whether hackers were interfering with the Trump campaign. They found something they weren’t expecting. ...snip In late July, one of these scientists—who asked to be referred to as Tea Leaves, a pseudonym that would protect his relationship with the networks and banks that employ him to sift their data—found what looked like malware emanating from Russia. The destination domain had Trump in its name, which of course attracted Tea Leaves’ attention. But his discovery of the data was pure happenstance—a surprising needle in a large haystack of DNS lookups...

President Barack Obama reportedly told Russian President Vladimir Putin in October that directly interfering with the U.S. election could result in an "armed conflict." According to NBC News, Obama opted to use the red phone to contact Moscow directly, a communication system that dates back to the Cold War. It's not an actual telephone, but instead sends a secure email message between the two countries. "International law, including the law for armed conflict, applies to actions in cyberspace," part of the Oct. 31 message read, according to NBC. "We will hold Russia to those standards."

Elon Musk called out an old Hillary Clinton tweet as a “hoax” Friday after a Twitter user flagged it for misleading disinformation and was ignored. The tweet, written Oct. 31, 2016 during Clinton’s failed presidential campaign, is a statement issued in response to a news report about an alleged secret server at Trump Tower that was being used to covertly communicate with Russia. “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russian-based bank,” Clinton wrote in the tweet alongside the statement issued by one of her then-top aides, Jake Sullivan. A Twitter user tagged...

I’m a college professor, which is one of those jobs that people outside the profession love to ask you about. For the better part of a decade, most of those conversations have been about one thing: free speech. Are universities, once sites of pure, open intellectual discourse, no longer so pure? What is the future of this endeavor I’ve dedicated my life to, if my peers and I are afraid to speak our minds? In one way, this interest makes sense. An enormous amount of high-profile media coverage has been dedicated to what is said, or not said, on certain...

n Wednesday, the Supreme Court issued an astonishing decision throwing out Wisconsin’s new legislative districts as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. The majority accused a Republican justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court of greenlighting a “racial gerrymander” by creating one more majority-Black district in the State Assembly. Wednesday’s unsigned decision, issued through the shadow docket, hands Wisconsin Republicans an unexpected victory in their quest to reduce Black representation in the legislature. It also alters the law of redistricting in fundamental yet cryptic ways that might, to a cynic, seem designed to disadvantage Democrats in every single case.

Troops are trained in rote set pieces, with no time devoted to improvising if things don’t go as planned. Military operations designed to take place sequentially—Step 1, then 2, then 3, etc.—fell apart, catastrophically. If Step 2 hit a big obstacle, the by-the-book soldiers moved on to Step 3 anyway. Therefore, large troop-transport planes tried to land, even though the airport hadn’t been completely secured and Ukrainian air defense systems hadn’t been destroyed. As a result, two Il-76 transport planes, each carrying 100 airborne troops, were shot down. Tanks aren’t supposed to roll through hostile territory all alone. They need...

As the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse has progressed, Americans who hope for a successful conviction have begun to focus their attentions on the true villain of the piece: the 75-year-old presiding judge, Bruce Schroeder. Among the many accusations that have been leveled at Schroeder this week are that he is “biased,” that he is “prejudiced,” that he is a secret “conservative,” “right-winger,” or “Trumpist,” that he is a “a gun nut,” that he is a “a racist” or wannabe member of the Klan, that he is the “worst judge in town,” and that he is attempting to parlay this trial...

As the party began trying to piece together its big social-spending and climate package, a split emerged between lawmakers who wanted to pass fewer programs (but do them well) and those who wanted to pass more programs (even if it means doing them poorly). A big part of this argument boiled down to how long policies should be funded for. The less-is-more crowd, dominated by party moderates, wanted to set policies in place permanently. The more-for-less brigade, dominated by progressives, wanted to fund programs temporarily in order to make their budget math work, essentially rolling the dice on the idea...

In the past two weeks, COVID-19 has struck three well-known people. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who had been fully vaccinated, died on Monday due to complications from the virus. Meanwhile, two men who had refused vaccination—conservative radio talk show host Dennis Prager and Texas gubernatorial candidate Allen West—caught the virus but survived. On Fox News, these stories are being exploited to cast doubt on COVID vaccines and to suggest that people should rely instead on “natural immunity” or therapeutic drugs. But in fact, the three stories illustrate how vaccine refusers endanger everyone else. People like Prager and West...

From his desk, Ryan Busse could hear his boss ranting that the country’s largest gun manufacturer, Smith and Wesson, had betrayed its peers in the industry. Just a year after the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado, Smith and Wesson had reached a settlement with the White House agreeing to a slew of safety measures, including trigger locks on all its new guns. Now other gun makers — including Kimber America, which employed Busse — would surely be pressured to do the same. The National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action accused Smith and Wesson of “craven...

A review of the data pertaining to the accusations in the phony Steele dossier about a Trump-Russia Bank connection discovered the sources used is most likely the same source the FBI used to obtain a FISA warrant to investigate the Trump-Alfa Bank connection. This person also just happens to be a radical Hillary Clinton supporter! It’s been more than two years since the 2016 election and Americans still don’t really know the sources for the phony Steele dossier used by the FBI and DOJ to obtain FISA warrants to spy on candidate and then President Trump. This nightmare for President...