Free Republic

Russia has effectively legalized patent theft from anyone affiliated with countries “unfriendly” to it, declaring that unauthorized use will not be compensated. McDonald’s said Tuesday that it would temporarily close its 850 restaurants in Russia, a significant decision for a company that gets 9 percent of its revenue from Russia and Ukraine. Without trademark protections, Russia could “take those McDonald’s that got shut down and … just let local operators operate the restaurants and call them McDonald’s,” Gerben said. Russia’s removal of intellectual property protections during wartime is not without precedent. Smithsonian Magazine describes how the German company Bayer lost...

Floundering in his attempts to wield political power while lacking a political office, Donald Trump looks increasingly like a stray orange hair to be flicked off the nation’s sleeve. His residual power, which he must use or lose, is to influence his party’s selection of candidates for state and federal offices. This is, however, perilous because he has the power of influence only if he is perceived to have it. That perception will dissipate if his interventions in Republican primaries continue to be unimpressive. So, Trump must try to emulate the protagonist of “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.”...

A recent alleged assassination plot against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was foiled over the weekend and the Chechen servicemen sent from Russia were “destroyed,” a Ukrainian security leader said Tuesday. Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, said during a broadcast marathon airing on Ukrainian TV channels that officials were recently tipped off that a unit of Kadyrovites, elite Chechen special forces, was on its way to kill Zelensky. After Ukrainian officials were informed by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), the Chechen special forces were killed Saturday on the outskirts of Kyiv, Danilov said. “We are...

Give Washington Post reporter Amy B. Wang credit for being very speedy -- specifically in writing up a slam of a Republican. At just after high noon on Tuesday, it was announced that Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds would deliver the Republican response to Joe Biden's State Of The Union address on March 1 and just a little over an hour later at 1:27 PM EST, Yang had completed her article on Reynolds along with the requisite slams.

Six months ago, the transatlantic alliance was on shaky ground, with President Biden’s promise of a reinvigorated NATO under U.S. leadership severely undermined by the Afghanistan debacle and a foreign policy that seemed unready for prime time. Today, Biden and his team have redeemed themselves in the eyes of many NATO allies, with a tough stance on Ukraine and the successful wrangling of the often-fractious alliance to support it. Ukraine’s fate, and Russia’s future relationship with the West, remain uncertain. Biden has said he is convinced Russian President Vladimir Putin, with more than 150,000 troops and massive weaponry amassed on...

How would you describe the scent of winter? Unlike spring, summer and fall, which have strongly defined aromas (flowers in bloom, beaches, decaying leaves), the current season is marked by the scent of nothing. Nothing’s growing. Nothing’s dying. It’s a kind of olfactory pause. But snow has a scent, and researchers say that scent depends on what’s in the ground and the air. And as both the atmosphere and the land are getting warmer, the scent of snow is getting stronger. How would you describe the scent of winter? Unlike spring, summer and fall, which have strongly defined aromas (flowers...

In the battle over voting rights, an idea is starting to move around in Republican circles: designated police forces designed to hunt down voter fraud. On the basis of available evidence, this is a solution in search of a problem. It is another example of what comes from former president Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has put a proposal for such a force in his new budget. In Georgia, former U.S. senator David Perdue, who is running as a Trumpian candidate in the GOP primary for governor against incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp...

WASHINGTON — When President Joe Biden steps up to a lectern in the East Room of the White House in front of a roomful of reporters Wednesday, he will be playing a presidential game of catch-up that many say he has no desire to win. A year into his presidency, Biden's 4 p.m. news conference will be just his second on U.S. soil and his sixth overall, according to historians who track interactions between presidents and the press. When solo, joint and foreign news conferences are factored in, Biden has held fewer than Donald Trump, Barack Obama and George W....

Regular folks and history buffs who believe Maryland leaned strongly toward the Confederacy during the Civil War era have never lacked evidence for the claim. It was a Marylander, after all, on the U.S. Supreme Court who wrote the opinion in the infamous 1857 Dred Scott case, which found that Black people were not citizens — a ruling that helped spark the fighting. And Marylanders voted for a Southern sympathizer, not Abraham Lincoln, for president in the election of 1860. Then, some 20,000 Marylanders took up arms for the Confederacy. But such facts can be deceiving if looked at in...

With the U.S. Supreme Court hearing arguments about the legality of federal vaccine mandates, a certain Covid Karen at the Washington Post is really irked about something vaguely related: Masks. The deputy editorial page editor and longtime columnist for said periodical, Ruth Marcus, went postal because Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch was not wearing a mask while hearing oral arguments on this matter. Marcus let the world know how upset she was with Gorsuch's maskless heresy on Monday by screeching to the world with this fiery op-ed, "Where was Justice Neil Gorsuch’s mask?"

The November 2020 election in Arizona’s largest county was administered properly and not marred by fraud, the Republican-led local government concluded in a lengthy report released Wednesday. The 93-page document debunks, one by one, vague allegations of potential problems previously identified by the GOP-led state Senate and championed by former president Donald Trump and his allies....The new report, produced by the Maricopa County Elections Department, concluded that the work of the private contractors hired by the GOP-led state Senate amounted to “faulty analysis, inaccurate claims, misleading conclusions” and was based on “a lack of understanding of federal and state election...

KINGSPORT, Tenn. - Matthew Hawn checked his phone to see if the wait was finally over. It had been five months since he was fired for teaching about White privilege at a high school in rural Tennessee. Two months since he had fought to regain his job at an emotional three-day hearing, becoming a symbol of the acrimonious debate over the way race, racism and history should be taught in America's schools. A lifelong resident of Kingsport, Hawn was well aware his liberal views made him an outlier in his overwhelmingly White, mostly conservative community. But that had never mattered...

It’s rare when lawyers — as opposed to their clients — take the Fifth Amendment. But Jeffrey Clark, the former Justice Department lawyer who reportedly tried to help Donald Trump overturn the 2020 presidential election, is now claiming the privilege against self-incrimination to avoid testifying before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. He has just been joined in that posture by one of Trump’s main outside legal advisers, John Eastman. Their fear of incrimination could well be justified: There can be serious state and federal criminal consequences for trying to fraudulently interfere with an election....

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — At Spectrum Health, a major health-care system here, officials spent part of last week debating whether to move to “red status” in a show of how strained hospitals had become. A flood of mostly unvaccinated covid-19 patients was arriving at emergency departments already packed with people suffering other medical issues, sending capacity to unprecedented levels. The only hesitation for Spectrum’s decision-makers? Data suggested the covid surge was not over.

NANTUCKET, Mass. - The Biden administration has taken pains in recent days to show it is working to ease the pain of inflation for Americans. The emphasis comes after months of pleas from worried Democrats, who have pressed White House officials to do more to acknowledge inflation as a central concern for voters and toutwhat they are doing to combat it. Any suggestion that the White House focus on inflation is new is a "false narrative, to put it bluntly" said one top White House economic aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to...

Even worse, the poll shows that registered voters prefer Republicans over Democrats in congressional races by 10 points. If the midterm elections were held today, the result would be a GOP landslide. Given how extremist and authoritarian the Republican Party has become...that is deep cause for concern.

BOISE — On a quiet street south of downtown Boise, Michael Dick has festooned his front yard with homemade signs, including a large yellow placard that facetiously thanks President Biden for a growing list of grievances — $4-a-gallon gas, inflation, Afghanistan, covid-19. In capital letters in black marker, Dick, 59, recently added "dead civilians" and "dead U.S. soldiers" to his bill of particulars. In another part of town, alongside a “No trespassing” sign, Michael Schwarz, 60, used black spray-paint to scrawl “Joe Blows” across an electric-pink poster board. And that’s mild compared to the sentiments some people — largely in...

The nation’s most restrictive abortion law remains in place for now, after a federal appeals court on Thursday sided with the state of Texas. In a brief 2-1 order, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit refused the Justice Department’s request to reinstate an earlier court ruling that had blocked enforcement of the Texas law, which bars the procedure as early as six weeks into pregnancy and makes no exceptions for rape or incest. The brief order, which is expected to be appealed the Supreme Court, was backed by Judges James C. Ho, a nominee of Donald Trump,...

Ending the pandemic has proved hard in the United States, and decades-long political dynamics are a big part of the problem. Not only has distrust in government contributed to vaccine hesitancy, but following a script too long in the making, many Republican leaders have encouraged citizens to see mitigation methods — like mask and vaccine mandates — as driven by malevolent motives.... This is the Republican playbook in 2021. But it’s nothing new. This sort of “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” epitomizes what historian Richard Hofstadter labeled “the paranoid style in American politics” almost five decades ago. In fact,...

Republican officials from Arizona told Congress on Thursday that Maricopa County conducted a “free, fair and accurate election” in November, that Joe Biden won the state and that a Republican-commissioned review of nearly 2.1 million ballots in the county did not find the widespread fraud claimed by former president Donald Trump. The House Oversight Committee summoned Jack Sellers, chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors; Bill Gates, vice chairman of the board; and Ken Bennett, a former Arizona secretary of state, to testify after the state Senate hired the Florida firm Cyber Ninjas to conduct a review. The six-month,...