Free Republic

Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones is creating a four-attorney unit dedicated to challenging actions by the Trump administration that his office says exceed federal authority or threaten the commonwealth’s interests. The Federal Accountability Unit will work across the Office of the Solicitor General and Civil Litigation Division and will be led by Deputy Solicitor General Megan Keenan. Jones’ office said the unit will give the Attorney General’s Office permanent staff dedicated to identifying federal actions, responding to them and pursuing litigation. “I have a fundamental responsibility as Attorney General to defend the Commonwealth and protect Virginians when the federal government...

“My comments may have been misconstrued to justify something I did not mean to justify,” El-Sayed told reporters after he addressed the caucus at a party convention in Lansing. “To anyone who feels like my comments might have been hurtful, I’m really sorry. That was not my intention.” El-Sayed’s apology was his latest attempt to unify Democrats after a bitter primary where he defeated U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens. He’s eager to push past a series of controversies involving allegations of antisemitism, including his association with controversial commentator Hasan Piker. He faces Republican nominee Mike Rogers in a race that will...

Police using Flock Safety’s artificial intelligence tools can now track a vehicle based only on its location and movements. Flock’s OS Investigate, formerly known as Nightshift, is an AI tool that identifies vehicles and ranks drivers’ “associates” based on how frequently they appear together at the same Flock camera, WIRED reported. Flock website code reviewed by WIRED listed 45 functions available to OS Investigate, including plate scans, camera metadata, arrest records, case files and 911 dispatch logs to identify potential suspects. “[T]his [Flock tool] really crosses a line from a tool that’s used to investigate suspicious people to deciding who...

In perhaps the most consequential move to date by the Trump administration to address the challenge of what it calls the “political terrorism” of the far-left, the U.S. State and U.S. Treasury Departments announced this week the designation of the Autistici/Inventati Collective, an Italy-based anonymous tech collective, as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. As the State Department described in its official announcement, A/I Collective provides sophisticated tech tools for a variety of far-left extremist actors, including website hosting, a blogging suite known as “No.Blogs,” mail services, and similar tech services. Utilizing these anonymous tools, anarchist and autonomous groups issue communiques...

Welcome to FAFOland “. . . the worse they become, the more they blame you for it.” —El Gato Malo on the Lefty-left As the Democratic Party pulls out all the stops to make itself ridiculous, their proxy warriors in the federal judiciary play chicken with the executive branch on sane, uniform standards for mail-in ballots. The Democrats don’t want sane, uniform standards for mail-in ballots because they are insane. They want to “defend Democracy” with mail-in ballot chaos. Democracy is their flabby rubric for any artifice or subterfuge that beats a path to power so they can continue their...

Anthony Fauci’s division at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) provided cover for sensitive CIA research on bioterrorism threats, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. An undated interagency agreement between the CIA and Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) appears to shed light on the origins of the institute’s involvement in biodefense. The CIA’s Biological Technology Center (BTC) initiated the collaboration on “forensic microbiology” on bioterrorism bugs for the intelligence community (IC). CIA funds would be used to leverage pre-existing civilian research efforts in a way that would benefit both CIA and NIH,...

A federal judge on Friday declined to block President Donald Trump's revised birthright citizenship order after the Supreme Court struck down his first plan. Trump originally directed federal agencies to interpret the 14th Amendment as not granting citizenship to the children of illegal aliens, but the Supreme Court shut down that order, prompting him to issue a revised directive. U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman previously issued a stay on Trump's first order, but did not do so against the revised version, Reuters reported. The Biden-appointed judge was nonetheless skeptical of the order's constitutionality. Trump signed the revised order earlier this...

Washington — Far-right political commentator Milo Yiannopoulos is currently in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, according to the agency's online detainee database. Reports indicate Yiannopoulos, who is British, was in New Orleans ahead of a concert headlined by the artist formerly known as Kanye West scheduled for Friday night. TMZ first reported Yiannopoulos' status. CBS News has reached out to the Department of Homeland Security and ICE for additional details and the basis for his apprehension. ...

Founded by Alexander Hamilton as the first industrial city in America, Paterson, N.J., is now home to America’s largest Palestinian community and largest proportion of Muslim residents. Today, New Jersey’s third-largest city is effectively run by its 30,000 Muslims, some of whom say they don’t need to learn English because it’s like living “back home” in an Arab city. [snip] In June 2023, Paterson Mayor Andre Sayegh signed a sister city agreement with the mayor of Ramallah, a city in the West Bank and the seat of power of the Palestinian Authority, which officially celebrates the killing of Israelis. And...

A federal judge issued a temporary restraining order that prevents the Postal Service from inserting itself into the election process while litigation continues. ================================================================ A federal judge Thursday blocked a Postal Service regulation that would exert control over mail-in ballots ahead of the midterm elections in the latest setback on the issue for President Donald Trump. The recently finalized measure would implement a key provision of Trump’s executive order on mail-in ballots that would add a new level of bureaucracy to the elections process, which is typically administered by states. The executive order directed the U.S. Postal Service to, among...

It seems that Flock cameras have sparked another debate that feels a whole lot like the fight over data centers. And while Flock cameras are not currently equivalent to China’s social credit score apparatus, the infrastructure could very well help create one here in the U.S. Because a government cannot build a comprehensive behavioral-control system without first building the ability to identify, track, connect, and retrieve information about ordinary citizens. Flock supplies part of that capability via large-scale, searchable vehicle-location data. According to Flock, it does not, nor has it ever, used facial recognition technology. But that doesn’t mean it...

Tonight we’re learning of a new communications incident involving Marine One while President Trump was on board. And the FAA is now moving to fire some air traffic controllers at LaGuardia after last March's fatal plane crash there.

FRANKLIN COUNTY, Pa. (WHP) — In a unanimous vote, the Franklin County Commissioners voted against renewing the county's contract with Flock Safety amid ongoing concerns over its use of automated license plate reader cameras (LPR). Commissioner Dean Horst said he, personally, has an issue with Flock in the database area in particular, despite moves to reduce the amount of time the data is kept from 30 days to seven days. "I think we're at the point now to where the lack of public trust in the system really concerns me, for us to stay in this conversation much longer," Horst...

President Donald Trump knows exactly what Democrats plan to run against this November: Orange Man Bad. So President Trump made a decision that has some political professionals reaching for the smelling salts. MAGA Inc. has roughly $400 million in its political war chest, and Trump wants part of it used for national advertising that tells voters what his administration has actually accomplished. The strategy is almost embarrassingly logical. Democrats plan to make congressional races a referendum on Trump. He's accepting the invitation. From The Atlantic:

It’s a dirty trick. The people who spent fifty years overturning old assumptions now accuse anyone who objects of being a radical. The accusation is repeated so often that it has almost become accepted without examination. But conservatism, properly understood, isn’t a radical philosophy. It’s almost the opposite. It’s an argument for restraint, continuity, ordered liberty, and respect for institutions that have survived because, more often than not, they contain wisdom we didn’t invent. There’s nothing radical about believing parents should have the principal role in raising their children. There’s nothing radical about believing men and women are different, that...

The Supreme Court lifted a lower court’s stay of President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to commandeer state vote-by-mail systems in a 6-3 vote on Monday night. Its explanation for the decision began with a lie. “About five months ago, President Trump issued an Executive Order designed to maintain public confidence in federal elections,” the court claimed in an unsigned order. In reality, Trump has no interest in maintaining public confidence in federal elections. He has spent the last 14 years publicly undermining confidence in election results, even in ones that he won. His executive order was intended to sow...

And now you understand Bessent’s obsession. The entire funding base of the US government is, at the margin, LEVERED. The buyers are not holding the bonds with their own money.. they are holding them with borrowed money, rolled overnight, against collateral that gets marked to market daily. That is a magnificent machine when repo is cheap and calm, and a doomsday device if repo ever seizes: a repo spike forces margin calls, margin calls force bond sales, bond sales push yields up, higher yields trigger MORE margin calls.. and suddenly the buyer of last resort is selling into a falling...

As a governor and senator, Huey Long is best remembered for his radical proposals to redistribute wealth by force and for criticizing President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "New Deal" as not expansive or progressive enough. So when Vice President J.D. Vance says out loud that he finds Long "great" and "interesting," that's worth keeping in mind.

A US airman who was arrested twice, once on the steps of the US Capitol while calling for the impeachment of President Donald Trump, was officially criminally charged Monday for his comments, according to a charging document his attorney shared with CNN. Maj. Jason Watson faces the following charges under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, according to the document: three violations of Article 88 for alleged “contemptuous” remarks about Trump, five violations of Article 92 for allegedly disobeying orders and two violations of Article 133 for alleged conduct unbecoming an officer. The rare Article 88 charges are connected to...

On Monday, the Democrat nominee for Senate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, appeared on Jesse Watters' show on Fox. You had to figure that was going to be an interesting exchange, and you would be right. El-Sayed was slick, but ultimately that backfired. He kept trying to talk over Watters. When asked about abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), El-Sayed claimed that we used to have the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Watters had to explain to him that yes, INS did the same things as ICE. Yes, they carried guns, apprehended illegal aliens, and removed them. Back then, however, you...