Free Republic

President Donald Trump, ensconced in his opulent private club of Mar-a-Lago this weekend, had a screed of combative thoughts. None, however, offered answers. Here in South Florida, the weekend air was filled with raw emotion in the wake of the deadliest school shooting since Sandy Hook. Local television broadcasts featured searing calls to action and demonstrations from students and parents alike. Trump, inside his estate and restrained from golfing for two straight days for fear of bad optics, was seemingly following along - and unleashed on Twitter. Just 40 miles north of Parkland, the President blasted the FBI for missing...

An Australian MP has drawn criticism for posting a photo online that showed him aiming a gun and asking: "Do you feel lucky, greenie punks?" George Christensen, a government MP, put the photo on Facebook on Saturday. The Greens party said the conservative MP's post was "disgraceful", noting it came in the same week that 17 people died in a US school shooting. Police said they would consider whether an investigation was warranted. The MP defended his post as "a joke". Mr Christensen said the post was a "tongue-in-cheek" reference to a famous line from the 1971 film Dirty Harry,...

Thousands of supporters of the deported former Georgian leader Mikheil Saakashvili have marched through the streets of Kiev, demanding the impeachment of the Ukrainian president. Journalists said an estimated 10,000 people took part in the rally on Sunday, though the ministry of internal affairs put the number at about 3,000. Protesters carried banners portraying President Petro Poroshenko with a red line drawn over his face. The demonstrators chanted “impeachment”, “resignation” and “Poroshenko is a thief”. Saakashvili, 50, who had been living in exile in Ukraine, was detained by masked men at a restaurant in central Kiev and deported to Poland...

Stalin biographer Stephen Kotkin spends several pages of his book discussing the lessons to be learned from Mussolini’s seizure of power in Italy in the early 1920s. It was something that happened gradually, in stages, when institutions that should have been able to bring him to heel did nothing, either due to their own lack of resolution or tacit support of his power grab.Italy after the First World War was, like many European countries, rife with instability and factionalism. Mussolini’s “fascist” party in 1922 had collected only 35 out of 500 seats in Italy’s Chamber of Deputies; despite this apparent...

"The other staff mentioned are very incidental. I mean, it seems like they put down all the names they could get. Some were people who worked there in 2014 — but most of these guys didn’t work for the troll factory for a long time. They didn’t even work there during the elections."

John Podesta: Donald Trump is the 'first draft dodger' in the information war against Russia

Reuters) - Hungarian leader Viktor Orban called on Sunday for a global alliance against migration as his right-wing populist Fidesz party began campaigning for an April 8 election in which it is expected to win a third consecutive landslide victory. Popular at home but increasingly at odds politically and economically with mainstream European Union peers, Orban has thrived on external controversy, including repeated clashes with Brussels and lately the United Nations. Those conflicts, mostly centered on migration since people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa flooded into Europe in 2015, have intensified as the elections approach...

Imagine the international uproar of a cleric of any other faith spoke from the pulpit about annihilating Muslims or any other group. But this will get no notice in the establishment media, unless it becomes necessary to explain Ahmad al-Rawashdeh’s words away and compel the Infidels to go back to sleep. This recalls the notorious genocidal hadith: “Abu Huraira reported Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a...

U.S. lawmakers — both Democrats and Republicans — and top national security officials in the Trump administration offered the same advice publicly and privately, often clashing with Trump’s Twitter stream: the United States remains staunchly committed to its European allies, is furious with the Kremlin about election interference and isn’t contemplating a preemptive strike on North Korea to halt its nuclear program. But Trump himself engaged in a running counterpoint to the message, taking aim on social media at his own national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, because he “forgot” on Saturday to tell the Munich Security Conference that the results...

The Kremlin-backed head of Russia's Chechnya region, Ramzan Kadyrov, says he hopes President Vladimir Putin will remain in power for life. The remark, not unusual for a regional leader who has frequently praised the president and called himself Putin's "foot soldier," comes weeks ahead of a March 18 presidential election that seems certain to hand Putin a new six-year term. "I wish our president and supreme commander in chief a long life and hope that he will run our country for life," Kadyrov said in a post on Telegram on February 15.

President Donald Trump says Russians are "laughing their asses off in Moscow" for the way Washington has handled the Russia investigations, following the Department of Justice's charges against Russian nationals last week for interfering in the 2016 election. "If it was the GOAL of Russia to create discord, disruption and chaos within the U.S. then, with all of the Committee Hearings, Investigations and Party hatred, they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They are laughing their asses off in Moscow. Get smart America!" Trump tweeted Sunday morning. The President has repeatedly called the investigations into his presidential campaign's potential collusion...

Facebook has come under intense scrutiny as more information has surfaced about how Russian actors used those platforms to spread misinformation online. Facebook VP of ads Rob Goldman said Russian meddling was more to sow distrust and chaos in the U.S. political system than to specifically elect Trump.

The navy admiral nominated to be the next US ambassador to Australia has told Congress America must prepare for the possibility of war with China, and said it would rely on Australia to help uphold the international rules-based system in the Asia-Pacific. In an excoriating assessment of China’s increasingly muscular posture in the region, Harry Harris said Beijing’s “intent is crystal clear” to dominate the South China Sea and that its military might could soon rival American power “across almost every domain”. Harris, soon to retire as the head of US Pacific Command in Hawaii, told the House armed services...

“Facebook vice president of advertising Rob Goldman slammed the media for what he said was misleading coverage of Russia’s meddling in American politics. “ “Most of the coverage of Russian meddling involves their attempt to effect the outcome of the 2016 US election. I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was *NOT* the main goal,” Goldman said.

“We are sliding back,” the Ukrainian journalist turned parliamentarian Serhiy Leshchenko warned a year ago about the arc of political reform in his country. At the time, his assessment sounded alarmist, but it rings true today. Since the 2014 Euromaidan revolution, reformers in and out of Ukraine’s government have tried to remake a fiscally troubled and deeply corrupt country into a Western-oriented, rules-based one, but have only partially succeeded. Ukraine’s future as an independent and sovereign state will depend as much on winning its internal war on corruption and fixing its broken government as on keeping Russia contained in the...

The following is a documentation of an interview with the German artist, activist for the rights of indigenous peoples, and UN advisor Rebecca Sommer, by the Polish website EuroIslam from January 18, 2018. Rebecca used to support Muslim “refugees” in Germany, and describes how her experience made her gradually change her mind over core issues. It is a long text but well worth the read. Please note that there is currently a mistranslation circulating, claiming that she said to she was moving to Poland. This is inaccurate; she said she knows Germans who are moving to Poland.Thanks to Ava Lon for the translation.Natalia...

IAF targets included a Hamas tunnel and military facilities. he Israeli Air Force (IAF) struck six Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip on Saturday evening in response to the detonation of an explosive device on the Gaza border earlier in the day that wounded four IDF soldiers, two severely. Targets included a Hamas-built terror tunnel from the Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza towards Israeli territory, a Hamas military facility in Netzarim and a further military facility in the Khan Younis neighborhood. Earlier Saturday, two IDF soldiers were severely wounded and two others moderately and lightly wounded after the device was detonated...

How many Mexican nationals from both within and without our borders should be indicted for meddling and conspiracy to defraud the American people? And shouldn't Hillary and the DNC and the entire Democrat congressional caucus be investigated for colluding with foreign nationals (including Mexico's current and past presidents) to interfere in our elections? How many Mexican nationals have fake-named facebook and twitter troll accounts that are used to affect our elections? How many Spanish only radio and TV stations are there that urge Mexican nationals to interfere in our elections with money, rallies, protests, etc, mostly for socialist democrats and...

So let’s restate the likely explanations. Why did the Russians do this? Because they could. It was useful for them to discover how much they could infiltrate the political process in the U.S., and above all to sow chaos. Actually favoring a Trump victory over Hillary makes little sense on substance, because most of Trump’s foreign policy positions—cheaper energy, expanded defense spending by us and NATO, more missile defense—are averse to Russian interests. But an election result that leaves chaos in its wake works perfectly well whether Hillary had won or Trump. In that sense, the Russian operation has been...

The indictment states that the Russians supported Trump in the Republican primaries and Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries. They supported Trump in the presidential campaign. They obviously thought that their candidacies “sowed confusion” in the ways that became obvious to us all. They were outrageous. They were not meant to be. By the same token, the Russians viewed Trump’s presidential campaign as doomed — just as I and everyone else did. They supported American chaos and hysteria and demoralization. Supporting Trump or other actions to detract from the magnitude of Clinton’s victory might weaken Clinton when she ultimately won....