Free Republic

President Trump’s choice to head the Labor Department, Andrew Puzder, is expected to withdraw his name from consideration, several media reported Wednesday. NBC News and Fox Business News reported that Puzder was likely to withdraw, after CNN reported earlier Wednesday that senior Senate Republicans had asked the White House to remove his nomination because not enough of the party’s senators planned to vote for his confirmation.

President Donald Trump will hold a large rally in Melbourne, Florida this Saturday, February 18 at 5 p.m. EST, according to Trump’s still active campaign website. The rally will be held at the same location as a campaign rally in on September 27, 2016, at the Orlando-Melbourne International Airport’s AeroMod Hangar 6 that held around 15,000 supporters in the hangar and on the tarmac. An estimated 12,000 supporters were reported turned away from the filled to capacity rally. Views of crowd from inside the media pen and from above.

Melania Trump is secretly miserable as first lady, a new report claims. Private, self-conscious, and smarting from some harsh, even mocking press, Melania is “struggling with the realities of her new role and the scrutiny that comes with it,” US Weekly says in its Feb. 27 cover story, citing family sources. “This life wasn’t her dream. It was Donald’s,” a Trump family friend, stylist Phillip Bloch, told the magazine. “Truthfully, it’s a lot to cope with.” Since Inauguration Day, Melania has spent almost all her time hiding inside the “gilded cage” of the family’s lavish, $100 million Trump Tower penthouse...

Agents from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosive arrested 31-year-old Oscar Fredy Garcia last week near Los Fresnos, Texas, during the failed purchase of an M-203 grenade launcher, court records revealed. Garcia is listed as an illegal immigrant from Mexico. The case began on February 6 when Garcia met with an undercover ATF agent to purchase the grenade launcher and three AK-47 rifles at a price of $5,000. During the meeting, Garcia gave the undercover agent $300 as a down payment. Another ATF agent wrote in the criminal complaint that Garcia revealed he was purchasing the weapons...

A recent report by the Economic Policy Institute blamed trade with China for the loss of 3.4 million manufacturing jobs since 2001. Don Boudreaux of George Mason University analyzes this claim in detail here, where he points out that innovation and automation are more likely culprits. But whether the jobs are lost as a result of international trade or domestic commerce, his most important point is that this is creative destruction. Stifled Creativity It is to creative destruction, a process first properly recognized by Joseph Schumpeter (whose 134th birthday it is today), that we owe much of human progress and...

PRESIDENT TRUMP’S NATIONAL security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, was forced to resign on Monday night as a result of getting caught lying about whether he discussed sanctions in a December telephone call with a Russian diplomat. The only reason the public learned about Flynn’s lie is because someone inside the U.S. government violated the criminal law by leaking the contents of Flynn’s intercepted communications. In the spectrum of crimes involving the leaking of classified information, publicly revealing the contents of SIGINT — signals intelligence — is one of the most serious felonies. Journalists (and all other nongovernmental citizens) can be...

A German Shepherd named Rumor won Best in Show at the 141st Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show in New York’s Madison Square Garden on Tuesday. Rumor was a sentimental favorite of the crowd, having finished second in 2016. This marked the end of a drought for the breed, which had last won in 1987.

Princeton is under renewed pressure to rename an institution honoring President Woodrow Wilson after activists branded him a “white supremacist”. Campus activists made another attempt to scrub Wilson’s name from the university’s School of Public and International Affairs (pictured above) over his views on race. He agreed to re-segregate large parts of the federal government, expressed sympathy for the Ku Klux Klan and regularly worked to exclude or dissuade black people from public life. As a Vox explainer notes, although the 1910s had very different racial norms to today, Wilson’s attitude was exceptional even then. However, despite the pressure, Princeton...

Poor little rich girl. The youngest person ever to win the lottery in Britain wants to sue the jackpot honchos who made her wealthy because the dough “ruined her life,” according to a report. Jane Park, 21 — who won $1.25 million playing Euromillions at age 17 — says she was too young to cope with the sudden flood of wealth, according to the UK Mirror. “At times it feels like winning the lottery has ruined my life. I thought it would make it 10 times better but it’s made it 10 times worse,” she moaned to the paper. “I...

Femininity, in all its forms, is undoubtedly undervalued. For this reason, all displays or expressions of femininity are an adamant and powerful form of social disobedience. Still, the Women’s Marches were not overwhelmingly defiant or angry responses to the lack of autonomy and power that feminine-identifying individuals have in this oppressive patriarchal society. Instead, the tone of these gatherings were celebratory. The purpose of these marches seemed to be uplifting feminine identities on the basis of their being white and cisgender. Altogether too often, the assertion of femininity by white, cisgender individuals is based in white supremacy and transphobia. These...

The ink on National Security Advisor Michael Flynn's resignation letter wasn't even dry when former Obama Chief Strategist David Axelrod announced the Left's new target. Speaking with CNN's Don Lemon Monday night, Axelrod essentially told the host that President Trump's Chief Strategist Steve Bannon is next on the hit list. After speaking of Flynn with Lemon, Axelrod suddenly and unexpectedly shifted to Bannon. From Daily Caller(Video), Axelrod said: "You know a name that we haven’t heard mentioned tonight in all of these discussions, the name of Steve Bannon, who has taken a role on national security, that is highly unusual...

Reports are surfacing about a potential national strike by immigrants this week—the latest in a growing movement to highlight the role immigrants play in the face of Donald Trump’s increasingly harsh crackdown. According to Washingtonian magazine, a number of local restaurants and other businesses have begun bracing for a national strike on February 16, in which immigrants—particularly those from Latinx communities—have been urged to stay home from work. The grassroots protest has seemingly been organized by word of mouth and across Latinx social media channels. “One of our delivery men who’s Latino told our kitchen about it, and then it...

Photo series with detailed explanations.

The coalition of pastors that includes those who led the defeat of Houston's "Equal Rights Ordinance," also known as the "Bathroom Bill", has issued a response to the report that the National Football League is now warning Texas against proposed legislation to keep boys out of girls' restrooms. SB 6, sponsored by Senator Lois Kohlkorst and heavily supported by Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, would establish a statewide uniform standard in all state and local government buildings—including schools—that boys, girls, men and women must use the restroom, shower or locker room of the sex identified on their birth certificate. "Yellow penalty...

Authorities lifted mandatory evacuation orders Tuesday for communities below the Oroville Dam. At a news conference Tuesday afternoon, Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea announced the order had been changed to an evacuation warning after he said the risk of flooding had been reduced. "We have concluded it is safe to reduce the emergency evacuation order to an evacuation warning"said Honea, who had made the initial call Sunday to evacuate a large swath of three counties below the imperiled dam. At the time, residents were told the spillway to the dam could collapse within an hour. Roadblocks on the two main...

Pittsburgh police arrested the Executive Director of the county's Republican Committee over the weekend for allegedly yanking his 26-year-old girlfriend from the car and punching her, according to the affidavit filed Saturday in support of the arrest. John Schnaedter, 36, is charged with one count of simple assault and released from the Allegheny County Jail on non-monetary bail, court records show. A witness on Bailey Avenue called police after he saw a man, later identified as Schnaedter, and a woman arguing in a Jeep parked on the street, according to the criminal complaint. He told police he heard a woman...

Tuesday on his nationally syndicated radio show, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh reacted to the resignation of Mike Flynn as National Security Adviser. According to Limbaugh, questions need to be asked going back to the previous administration and how the leak about Flynn’s interaction with Russia’s ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak. Everybody just calm down, just calm down. All of this was predicted to you, every bit of this was predicted to you. I mean the media behavior. To show you just how lame the media is and how little they’ve got, they’re already asking what did Trump know...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiJKDVy3XQ8

The New York Post smeared Breitbart Senior Editor MILO as an “alt-right extremist” in a recent article mentioning the Dangerous Faggot, despite the fact that MILO has repeatedly dismissed the label. “Chadwick Moore, a 33-year-old journalist who lives in Williamsburg, had been a lifelong liberal. Then, last September, he penned a profile for Out magazine of Milo Yiannopoulos — a controversial alt-right extremist who is an outspoken critic of feminism, Muslims and gay rights (despite being openly gay himself),” proclaimed the note at the beginning of OUT Magazine contributor Chadwick Moore’s recent article where he came out as a conservative....

Paul Ryan addressed former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s resignation during House Republicans’ weekly press conference Tuesday morning. The House Speaker had just been asked if “the American public [deserves] to know whether the President of the United States directed Mike Flynn to talk to the Russian ambassador about the issues of sanctions during the transition period,” to which he responded by taking “a step back for a second.” “National security is perhaps the most important financial or responsibility a president has, and I think the President made the right decision to ask for his resignation,” Ryan told the room...