Free Republic

...President Donald Trump has recommended a cut of some 30% to the State Department’s budget, which includes the funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development and most of America’s investments in global health. Congress is unlikely to go along with such large cuts, but our best guess is that, by the time the dust settles, key foreign-aid programs will be scaled back. Even modest cuts would represent the reversal of a long-term trend of increasing U.S. support for foreign aid, and a similar mood of retrenchment has taken hold elsewhere. In the U.K., the world’s second-largest aid donor, there...

Editor's Note: The following post has been slightly adapted from its original publication at Liberty Unyielding. Aliens are foreigners, not citizens, as one can see from dictionary definitions. So they do not include the typical immigrant, who is a naturalized citizen. It was thus inaccurate for The Washington Post’s Jenna Portnoy to write a story last Thursday claiming that the House of Representatives had passed a bill allowing “immigrants” to be deported if they are criminal gang members, when in fact the bill was aimed at “aliens.” (“Bill lets officials deport immigrants for gang ties,” Sept. 15, pp. B1 &...

The latest telecast of the Emmy awards on CBS drew the lowest audience ever, 11.4 million, and that is no surprise. This show could not have been more predictable -- quickly devolving into a boorish hours-long festival of Trump-bashing and Hillary-mourning. Awards shows used to be blockbusters for TV. But in the Age of Trump, they’re becoming screaming political spectacles, like the infamous Paul Wellstone funeral/pep rally of 2002. The red-state audience knows it’s going to be a leftist hootenanny attacking conservatives, all night long. Why put up with it? So they don’t bother. Naturally, the Hollywood crowd gave out...

A group calling itself the Women’s Media Summit has a radical plan for fixing Hollywood’s gender imbalance. Boycott Hollywood movies that don’t meet the group’s definition of a gender-balanced production. What does that actually mean? Another goal is to have production companies adopt a labeling system, similar to the “No animals were harmed in the making of this film,” but for equitable gender representation behind-the-scenes and on the screen. Boycotts are hardly new on the left. Just ask Chik-fil-A, which endured a progressive-powered boycott following news that the company’s founder didn’t support same sex marriage. That’s a position President Barack...

A third deadline has now passed for the FBI and Justice Department to give the House Intelligence Committee subpoenaed documents related to the Trump dossier. And for a third time, the bureau has not produced the material. The dossier is a collection of what former FBI Director James Comey called "salacious and unverified" allegations of collusion between Russia and Trump campaign figures in the 2016 campaign. The Russia allegations were compiled by a former British spy, Christopher Steele, who was commissioned by the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which is thought to have been paid for the work by wealthy...

The corruption of American higher education has been in the news a lot in the last few years. “Snowflakes” and “safe spaces,” crowds of thugs shutting down conservative speakers, craven administrators caving in to demands of activist students and faculty have become increasingly common since the rise of Donald Trump sparked a “resistance” movement. Even progressives who have run afoul of campus Robespierres are writing books about free speech now that their revolutionary children have started devouring their own. What David Horowitz has been warning about in his books and speeches for more than thirty years -- the ideological hijacking...

It has been said that you could get a declaration of war against Canada if you claimed it was for the children. While Jimmy Kimmel’s personal story of his child’s medical needs is compelling, his exploitation of that story to advance lies about the Graham-Cassidy ObamaCare replacement is shameful. Not only does he lie to a national audience about Graham-Cassidy’s impact on those with preexisting conditions, he stooped to calling one Louisiana senator a liar and the other an “inbred”. Kimmel called the ObamaCare replacement bill’s co-author, Louisiana GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy, a liar after Cassidy appeared on Kimmel’s late...

Just when you think you’ve heard it all, a pastor calls your radio show asking how to respond to a congregant who claims that cannabis was sanctioned by God in the Torah. That’s right, sanctioned by the Lord Himself, not to be smoked but to be burned in large quantities by the priests of Israel. Far out! To be sure, there was a time in my life when I would have readily believed something like this, since I spent 1969-1971 as a heavy drug-using, hippie rock drummer, consuming everything from pot to LSD and from speed to heroin. Not surprisingly,...

For the first eight months of his presidency, Donald Trump has been continually thwarted by a combination of the left-wing media, the “deep state” bureaucracy, the Democrats and the establishment Republicans. On his own, President Trump has made dramatic and positive executive orders, but his legislative accomplishments have been disappointing due to the powerful forces arrayed against him. Theoretically, the President should have been able to achieve all of his goals because the Republicans control all branches of government. Regrettably, the uncooperative congressional leadership has not produced any major victories for the President or his 63 million supporters. In essence,...

Freshly returned from August recess, legislators find themselves embattled in heated debates on immigration, tax reform, and health care.The democratic process passed down to us by the Founding Fathers has long ensured that American voters have their voices heard, via representatives in the House and Senate chambers. Now more than ever, these debates are happening outside the marble halls of the Capitol.Policy debates are now ubiquitous and constant. Anyone who wants to participate needs two things: an opinion and an internet connection. Welcome to the world of digital activism.Online activism, even online petitioning, is not a new concept. However, it...

All around the Federal Reserve building, someone for years has been riding his horse—a la Paul Revere—crying out in excitement over the notion that 2 percent inflation is finally coming. This week, Janet Yellen has finally gotten to where many other Central Bankers around the world already are—it’s not happening. We’re not even close. Especially since we haven’t seen any real, sustainable increases in the Producer Price Index (PPI) or the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Indeed, the European Central Bank leaders (along with the Fed) have been throwing everything they possibly can at inflation, and it doesn’t seem to move....

Another anniversary of the tragic 9/11 terrorist attacks has just passed by with the nation in solemn remembrance and the families of victims still grieving. My father, James Michael Roux, was on United Airlines Flight 175, the second plane to hit the world trade centers. Having grown up without a father, I understand the personal cost of being complacent when dealing with radical Islamic terrorism. This is why I want to raise some worrying statistics from the Pew Research Center and how we should respond to the epidemic of these radical beliefs. Ben Shapiro released a short video titled 'The Myth of...

The radical environmentalist war on fossil fuels has opened a new front: a war on pipelines.For years, activists claimed the world was rapidly depleting its oil and natural gas supplies. The fracking revolution (horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing) obliterated that argument, by sending US oil and gas production to new heights. Indeed, record gas supplies and plummeting gas prices combined with the Obama EPA war on coal to shutter many coal-fired power plants.So the battle increasingly shifted to the far more emotional claim that continued reliance on fossil fuels (which provide over 80% of the US and global energy that...

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has been doing the leftist media interview circuit recently, pressing his peculiar thesis that professional (i.e., paid) scientists are a superior class of humans whose conclusions are intrinsically beyond reproach and must therefore be accepted blindly by unscientific lunks like you. In each of these interviews, a non-climate scientist asks a series of predetermined questions designed to elicit rehearsed responses from the non-climate scientist Tyson, the upshot of which is that (a) people who question man-made global warming are anti-scientific fools driven by irrational agendas; (b) scientific consensus is not the product of the social and...

What do a retweet of a billion-dollar presidential golf swing hitting a hole-in-one into the back of a former presidential Democrat candidate, the new name poetically given to a crazed lunatic who has a fetish for shooting off misguided rockets, and a March 4th claim of “wiretapping” in Trump Tower that took seven months to be proven true, all have in common? President Donald J. Trump‘s magnificent way of communicating to the American people and the world instantaneously -- tweeting. What Twitter is for President Trump in 2017, Facebook was for former President Obama in 2008. There has been much...

The Resistance wants a showdown with Donald Trump, and looks like it will get its wish soon. Our Democrats would make California a “sanctuary state,” setting up a confrontation with the federal government over fundamental questions of who gets to enter the country, who gets to stay and how the rules will be enforced. Meantime, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra on Wednesday announced the state is suing the Trump administration yet again. This time, California wants to block the president’s proposed border wall on the grounds that it would be bad for the environment. Since when does the environment trump...

Donald Trump's speech to the United Nations on Tuesday was not just great, it was totally refreshing. The president's address to the U.N. General Assembly was so perfect it almost made me forget all the horrible speeches his predecessor gave to that corrupt, bloated and anti-American body. For the first time in eight years the world saw an American president not spending half his time apologizing to the U.N. for our country's past, present and future. President Obama's U.N. speeches always managed to make it sound like the United States was no different from Iran and North Korea. He'd...

Here is the letter I just wrote: I can not believe I ever voted for you for President . . . actually I was voting for Sarah, not you anyhow. As a conservative I am fed up with this attitude of not taking what you can get and revisiting the issue another year solely because it is not perfect. Anyone who votes against this should be immediately stripped of their committee posts and standing in the Party. You have let your anger towards President Trump and ego get in the way of what this country needs right now, and that...

That's it. Fed up with the three of them. I give Paul a pass since he is a Doctor and will only vote for the perfect . . . let the voters in Kentucky decide on his fate. McCain, Murkowski and Collins need to pay a penalty for putting themselves and their egos and dislike of this President ahead of what's good for the country. Bombard their offices with calls and curse them out. I'm sure there will things in the new bill I don't like but take what you can get now and revisit it next year.

One thing that is clear from President Trump’s first several months in office is that powerful corporate media giants like CNN, the New York Times and others have become hopelessly more biased against him than ever. Unfortunately, the power of these biased corporate media giants may only get more powerful under the pending mega-merger of AT&T and CNN’s parent company, Time Warner. President Trump said last year that this deal would put “too much concentration of power in the hands of too few” and promised to block it; yet there’s been dangerously little attention paid to a corporate marriage that...