Free Republic

In a moving interview, Amy Shively Hawk discusses her new book, Six Years In The Hanoi Hilton (featuring a foreword by Sen. John McCain), about her father’s time as a POW in a Hanoi prison during the Vietnam War. Learn about the courage and bravery of one of America’s finest soldiers. In 1967, U.S. Air Force fighter pilot James Shively was shot down over North Vietnam. After ejecting from his F-105 Thunderchief aircraft, he landed in a rice paddy and was captured by the North Vietnamese Army. For the next six years, Shively endured brutal treatment at the hands of...

News arrived in Europe in 1571 that Muslim Turks, under the command of Lala Kara Mustafa Pasha, surrounded the Christians in Famagusta, Cyprus. Muslims promised the defenders of Cypus that if they surrendered, they would be allowed to leave. Lala Kara Mustafa Pasha broke his promise by demanding a boy for his pederasty. When denied, he flayed alive the Venetian commander. His Muslim warriors then killed all 6,000 Christians prisoners. He turned the beautiful St. Nicholas Church into the Lala Mustafa Pasha Mosque. After this, Turkish Muslims planned on attacking Rome, and from there conquer the rest of western Europe....

While Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will never admit it, the 2015 Paris climate treaty Canada signed with great fanfare died last week.It died because of the release of U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2018 budget plan.While Trump has to get it through the U.S. Congress, which means parts of it are unlikely to survive, his clear intention to gut U.S. climate change policy by dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency spells the death knell for the Paris treaty.Trump is proposing deeper cuts to the EPA than any other government agency, reducing its $8.2 billion budget by 31%, laying off 19% of its...

The latest indication of the need to drain the judicial swamp comes in the form of Hawaii Judge Derrick Watson’s ruling placing a hold on President Trump’s second executive order placing a temporary immigration ban on six predominantly Muslim countries. It is, as President Trump noted, a classic case of "judicial overreach." Judge Watson’s logic belongs in a parallel judicial universe where judges are allowed to regulate foreign policy, clearly a presidential prerogative defined in both law and the U.S. Constitution. Judge Watson cites no law and, in the case of the Constitution, says the travel ban violates the Establishment...

Progressives eat up the Trump=Hitler narrative to the point where there is a billboard in downtown Phoenix, which is heavy on such imagery. Santa Monica-based activist Karen Fiorito designed the billboard, which has the president in between two nuclear explosions and dollar signs imitating swastikas used by the Nazi Party. Fiorito says she’s worried about money and politics, along with the direction of the country under Trump. Yeah, that goes for you and every other voter who cast a ballot for a losing candidate in a presidential election. The back of Fiorito’s billboard shows a bunch of hands using sign...

Tim Allen opened up briefly about what it means to be a conservative in Hollywood in 2017 during an interview with late-night host Jimmy Kimmel Thursday night, explaining that one must be “real careful” in talking about President Donald Trump or else risk being beaten up. “You’ve gotta be real careful around here. You get beat up if you don’t believe what everybody believes,” the 63-year-old Last Man Standing star told Kimmel when asked about his attendance at Trump’s inauguration in January.

President Donald Trump’s budget director told reporters Thursday the White House was no longer spending money on climate change research because it’s a “waste of your money.” “We’re not spending money on that anymore,” Mick Mulvaney, the Office of Management and Budget director, said at a press briefing while discussing the president’s decision to dial back climate science research. “We consider that to be a waste of your money,” he added. Trump released his congressional budget request Thursday, which contained several contentious reductions, including dramatic cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Energy. The White House’s...

Representative Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) is making a strong case to become the poster child for Trump Derangement Syndrome. Long an exploiter of loony left memes, such as the contention that the CIA deliberately spread a crack epidemic in America's inner cities, Waters loves the attention and praise she garners from voicing the radical thoughts other crazy lefties shy away from. She owes her national profile to her readiness to glorify the 1992 Rodney King rioters in Los Angeles as participating in a "rebellion," not a "riot," justifying the looting of many Korean-owned stores as "mothers who took this as an...

Naval Special Warfare says no women have met standards. Naval special warfare jobs have been open to women for a year but no women are in the pipeline yet, and Navy officials concede it may be some time before a woman makes it into either a SEAL team or into the Special Warfare Combat Crewman field. Naval Special Warfare head RADM Tim Szymanski recently told an industry conference that several women have tried to get into the pipeline but have not met physical standards...

The bill has had the worst rollout of any major piece of legislation in memory, and failure is very much an option. If the proposal falters, it will be a political debacle that could poison President Trump’s relationship with Congress. This is a product of how the Republican sweep of 2016 was won on separate tracks. Trump tore up many Republican orthodoxies and went out and found a different way to unlock the electoral map, winning in the industrial Midwest. Congressional Republicans more or less stuck with the usual script, kept Trump at arm’s length and held their majorities in...

The Ryan-Trump tag team, though, has little margin for error. Without the help of Democrats, they stand to lose about 20 Republican votes in the House and two votes in the Senate on this first go-around. That means buy-in from most of Mr. Trump’s rivals from the Republican presidential race — Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, whom Mr. Trump branded as “lightweights”; Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, dubbed “little Marco”; and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, whom he named “Lyin’ Ted.” While Mr. Rubio has said he is open to the bill that Mr....

I don't have any special information. But the way it works is, the FISA court, through Section 702, wiretaps foreigners and then listens to Americans. It is a backdoor search of Americans. And because they have so much data, they can tap -- type Donald Trump into their vast resources of people they are tapping overseas, and they get all of his phone calls.

House Speaker Paul Ryan fired a warning shot Thursday at Republican senators who have been critical of his health-care plan, saying he has not heard directly from them but noting that they will get their chance to amend the Obamacare repeal and replace legislation. The House legislation to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act faces a steep climb in the lower chamber, though a vote is still expected to happen sometime next week. The bill passed the Budget Committee narrowly Thursday, with three conservative Republicans voting against it. Leaders are searching for ways to fix the bill to placate...

An Austal-built Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) and crew are stranded in Singapore because of a change in training standards propelled by a series of recent engineering breakdowns throughout the LCS fleet. The USS Coronado, built in Mobile nearly five years ago, deployed to the Pacific Rim in June last year to relieve the LCS Fort Worth. The Coronado and its crew were supposed to arrive back in the home port of San Diego by Thanksgiving but could now end up being abroad for an indefinite period as they wait for a relief crew to be trained to the new Naval...

Whenever a Republican president nominates a judge to the Supreme Court, progressives muse loudly about the importance of stare decisis, the principle governing the law of precedents. All they are worried about is the overturning of Roe v. Wade. In fact, stare decisis does not demand blind adherence to poorly reasoned rulings in the mold of Roe.

President Donald Trump as a candidate promised to unshackle the American energy industry by undoing most of the job killing regulations created by the Obama administration. In a court filing, Justice Department lawyers revealed that the new administration is planning to repeal the Obama hydraulic fracturing rule, that placed severe restrictions on the process of getting oil and natural gas from shale. Earlier yesterday, the administration said they would roll back some of the automobile emissions standards and curtail other Obama administration environmental rules on water and coal leasing.

Late Wednesday evening, news broke that another liberal judge had put a temporary hold on the implementation of President Donald Trump’s travel ban. And during CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, commentator Van Jones voiced his approval. “An action can be ruled unconstitutional if it's on the face of it, it looks like it's a good thing but there's an intent that's unconstitutional,” he argued, “There's a discriminatory intent here. And the discriminatory intent of the Trump administration is clear.” According to Jones, the reason the travel ban is discriminatory, and thus unconstitutional, is because during the election Trump announced he wanted...

Payback is a . . . Rand Paul. After John McCain, speaking on the Senate floor yesterday, accused Paul of “working for Vladimir Putin,” Paul had a crushing comeback on today’s Morning Joe. Said Paul, “he makes a really, really strong case for term limits. I think maybe he’s past his prime. I think maybe he’s gotten a little bit unhinged.” View the video here.

President Donald Trump made good on a long-time conservative goal in his first proposed budget Thursday morning, targeting the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities for complete elimination. Trump’s budget would zero out the $445 million budget for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a substantial source of funding for programming and broadcast operations on public TV stations and NPR radio stations nationwide, per the Washington Post. The budget would also eliminate the budgets for both national endowments, which stood at $148 million each in 2016, as well as $230 million for the Institute...

In a comment that will no doubt outrage the feminist left, Paglia praised men for taking on the most dangerous jobs in society. It is an absolute outrage how so many pampered, affluent, upper-middle-class professional women chronically spout snide anti-male feminist rhetoric, while they remain completely blind to the constant labor and sacrifices going on all around them as working-class men create and maintain the fabulous infrastructure that makes modern life possible in the Western world. Only a tiny number of women want to enter the trades where most of the nitty-gritty physical work is actually going on—plumbing, electricity,...