Free Republic

If their plan is just to rely on Trump’s overreach, then they’ll be repeating Biden’s mistakes.Voters certainly seem to be going south on President Donald Trump’s war on non-White immigrants. In a New York Times poll conducted in late September, a slim majority of registered voters said the president had gone too far in aggressively trying to ferret out and deport non-Americans — and that was before federal agents started using tear gas and pepper spray on the streets of Chicago.It’s a rare glimpse of bluer skies for Democrats since last year’s presidential election. But if their plan on immigration...

The International Monetary Fund says the global economy is performing better than expected despite Trump’s tariffs, but future growth prospects are at risk.The global economy is performing better than expected amid a historic upheaval in U.S. trade policy, but President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs are beginning to erode prospects for future growth, the International Monetary Fund said Tuesday in its latest forecast. Global growth this year is projected at an annual rate of 3.2 percent, up 0.2 percentage points from the fund’s July forecast and 0.4 points higher than April’s, which was prepared as the president finalized his announcement of...

Republicans have tried more than 70 times over the past 15 years to weaken or kill Obamacare. But their campaign keeps backfiring. The sweeping tax and spending bill President Donald Trump signed this summer got his party closer to that goal than ever before. Though never marketed as a repeal, it unraveled much of the law and is expected to eventually push millions of people who gained insurance since the Affordable Care Act’s passage off the rolls. Even that legislative achievement is proving politically fraught. As the partial government shutdown stretches into its second week, the White House and a...

Agencies have been shuttered going on three weeks with no end in sight as the White House and congressional Democrats continue their standoff.The ongoing government shutdown will collide with the U.S. economy this week, as missed paychecks and the absence of billions of dollars of government services reverberate beyond federal workers and sting the broader public.President Donald Trump and lawmakers in Congress remain deadlocked heading into a third week of shuttered federal agencies. Republicans control both chambers of Congress, but lack the votes in the Senate to defeat a filibuster of legislation to fund ongoing operations. Democrats insist that Trump...

The Washington Post reviewed leaked audio from four off-the-record lectures the tech investor delivered in San Francisco over the past month that fused beliefs about religion and technology.Tech billionaire Peter Thiel recently warned that Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and critics of technology or artificial intelligence are “legionnaires of the Antichrist” in private lectures on Christianity that connected government oversight of Silicon Valley to an apocalyptic future, according to recordings reviewed by The Washington Post.In the four, roughly two-hour lectures, which began last month and culminated Monday at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Thiel laid out his religious views to...

His Gaza agreement, though still fragile, adds to an unprecedented peacemaking record.Not only does Donald Trump deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, but there has arguably never been an American president who deserved it more.Four of his predecessors have won the prize. Barack Obama won seven months into his presidency essentially for not being George W. Bush — and even he said he didn’t deserve it. Woodrow Wilson won for creating the League of Nations, which proved to be a feckless disaster that the United States never even joined. Theodore Roosevelt won for ending a single conflict, the Russo-Japanese War, which...

What in the Benjamin C. Bradlee is going on with The Washington Post editorial board? After shocking the internet by conceding that Obamacare was really just an expensive mess, the newspaper seems to have red-pilled itself hard again. The Post once again tackled the ongoing political standoff between the GOP and Democrats over the Schumer shutdown, surprisingly chastising liberal lawmakers for being stubborn by continuingly voting down the Republican clean continuing resolution (CR). Then came a jaw-dropping admission from the liberal newspaper: “The government is too big. There is plenty of fat to cut.” But the newspaper even took it...

Terradot, a carbon removal company, is using “enhanced rock weathering” to sequester carbon by spreading crushed volcanic rock over farmland.STATE OF SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Across vast stretches of farmland in southern Brazil, researchers at a carbon removal company are attempting to accelerate a natural process that normally unfolds over thousands or millions of years. The company, Terradot, is spreading tons of volcanic rock crushed into a fine dust over land where soybeans, sugar cane and other crops are grown. As rain percolates through the soil, chemical reactions pull carbon from the air and convert it into bicarbonate ions that...

Police arrested a New Jersey man who allegedly had a Molotov cocktail near St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, DC, on Sunday.The arrest occurred just before the church was set to hold its Red Mass to celebrate the beginning of the new Supreme Court term.The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) said it “engaged an individual who set up a tent on the steps of the Cathedral,” according to a press release.SNIPThe suspect, identified as 41-year-old Louis Geri of Vineland, New Jersey, is preliminarily charged with Unlawful Entry, Threats to Kidnap or Injure a Person, and Possession of a Molotov Cocktail. SNIPhttps://x.com/_ellepurnell/status/1975037735816908980

After months of emergency rulings, the justices will be asked to render final verdicts on economic and immigration policies at the core of Trump’s presidency. The Supreme Court and President Donald Trump are headed for a reckoning. After months of terse emergency rulings that largely avoided major confrontations with the new administration, the justices will open their new term on Monday faced with the need to render full, final verdicts on policies at the core of Trump’s presidency. “It really is going to be a showdown,” said Jennifer Nou, a law professor at the University of Chicago. “So many of...

Larry and David Ellison’s holdings span movies, TV networks, CBS and soon a stake in TikTok, in a paradigm-shifting portfolio with huge influence.Journalists at CBS News reeled on Friday as they digested news reports that opinion journalist Bari Weiss, a fierce critic of the mainstream media, would become the editor in chief of the straitlaced legacy brand.Two months earlier, there had been cautious optimism in the Midtown Manhattan newsroom, according to two CBS News staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private information. Movie producer David Ellison, son of software billionaire Larry Ellison, dropped by to introduce...

The Trump administration has telegraphed that mass firings are coming, but officials have cautioned that such moves could violate appropriations law.Senior federal officials have quietly counseled several agencies against firing employees while the government is shut down — as President Donald Trump has suggested he will — warning the strategy may violate appropriations law, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations. The officials cautioned that firings — known as RIFs, or reductions in force — could be vulnerable to legal challenges under statutes labor unions cited this...

JERUSALEM-Prime Minister Menahem Begin said Monday that Israel is providing training, supplies and artilery support to Christian militiamen in south Lebanon. It is Israel's duty"to prevent what he called an attempt at "genocide" by Palestinian forces in Lebanon. Begin blasted France for failing to intervene on behalf of Christian villagers and soldiers who have been under earch all Issues siege in south Lebanon for months. He said that "Christian France, the patron of the Maronite Christians for ages. had sold them down the river" to carry favor with the Arab oil-producing countries who support the Palestinians. IT HAS BEEN known...

SNIP Known in the Armenian community as “psycho Barbie,” Nadine had allegedly stalked an ex. She was also accused of keying his new girlfriend’s car and showing up at his home on Christmas Day in 2010 with her two children to try to win him back, according to a restraining order. “Nadine always believed she was above the law,” the former boyfriend said. With Menendez, friends said, she played hard to get, though, pitting him against Anton. When they began dating again in 2018, Menendez allegedly sent Capitol Police officers from Washington, DC, to his rival’s office in Hackensack, New...

A mix of high borrowing costs, dwindling job openings and growing economic and political uncertainty have left many U.S. households at a standstill, with many Americans saying they feel unable to buy new homes, take new jobs or move to new cities. The Federal Reserve’s interest rate cut last week — the first of the year, with the expectation that more will follow — may have boosted stock prices, but it isn’t likely to make much of a difference to everyday Americans, economists say. While the economy is generally in good shape, many people feel stuck. “Consumers have been increasingly...

Democracy Dies in Darkness with DemocratsThe chair of a new panel of federal immunization advisers selected by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Friday that the group’s “enormous depth and knowledge about vaccines, about science” should be obvious to anyone listening to them work.But medical associations and scientific experts who watched the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices meetings Thursday and Friday panned the panel’s performance as the group reversed recommendations for coronavirus and a combined measles, mumps, rubella and chicken pox vaccine.They said the members were unprepared, misunderstood or ignored key data and highlighted flawed or...

President-elect Donald Trump filed a lawsuit on Friday, vowing to bring justice to his name after years of attacks from the mainstream media. The incoming 47th president announced he is suing several media outlets, including the New York Times, CBS News, Penguin Random House, and the Daily Beast, alleging widespread bias and defamation. Trump’s lawyer, Edward Andrew Paltzik, demands $10 billion in damages for publishing defamatory material. In the lawsuit, Trump accused the mainstream media of “defaming and disparaging” him during coverage of the election and making “false and defamatory statements.” The NYT was at the center of the lawsuit....

Republicans in Congress are launching an aggressive campaign to punish individuals they accuse of posthumously smearing Charlie Kirk, threatening to bring them before lawmakers, defund entities that protect them and oust them from positions of power. They are also trying to castigate one of their own. On Monday evening, two House Republicans introduced resolutions to censure Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) and remove her from her congressional committees for comments she made about the conservative influencer during an interview with liberal commentator Mehdi Hasan. During the interview, Omar expressed “empathy” for Kirk’s wife and children but also chastised those who “completely...

Did the Washington Post fire a long-time editor for speaking truth to power? Or did she lose her job because she couldn't do basic research before smearing the victim of a political assassination? Or worse? YMMV, but the way Karen Attiah frames the argument in her newly launched Substack certainly looks sus, as the kids say these days. It takes her an awfully long time to get to the catalyst for her termination .... and for good reason, as it turns out: What "work" would that be? Well, it turns out to be the work of slagging Charlie Kirk in...

Karen Attiah A left-wing columnist revealed in a Substack on Monday that she was fired by the Washington Post over social media posts amid the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the Colorado school shooting. "On Bluesky, in the aftermath of the horrific shootings in Utah and Colorado, I condemned America’s acceptance of political violence and criticized its ritualized responses — the hollow, cliched calls for ‘thoughts and prayers’ and ‘this is not who we are’ that normalize gun violence and absolve [W]hite perpetrators especially, while nothing is done to curb deaths," Karen Attiah wrote. Kirk, a leading conservative activist, was...