Free Republic

Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said Tuesday that he plans to announce a reelection bid for 2024. The senator confirmed his plans to Cleveland.com, but declined to elaborate further. There is a longer answer, but that’s my point,” Brown said, according to Cleveland.com. “I haven’t formally announced, but I plan to.” Democratic strategists in recent months have pointed to Brown as a potential Democratic candidate for president in 2024 if President Biden does not seek another term. The president will turn 80 in November, and questions have swirled about his fitness to lead after a succession of harsh policy losses and...

No candidate has fallen faster than John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, due to the unfortunate neurological damage from his massive stroke. His once double-digit lead is down to 5 in the latest CBS poll.

Putin's commanders have begun quietly fleeing Crimea as they try to sell their homes and get their families back to Russia, Ukrainian spies have claimed. Russian FSB agents and those working for the occupying government are also trying to get off the peninsula, which has been occupied by Kremlin forces since 2014. Officials have been spooked by the rapid advance of Ukrainian forces across the north of the country in recent days, the military intelligence service added, amid reports that soldiers are withdrawing from Melitopol - just 70 miles away.

Could Russia still fight NATO? The war in Ukraine has proved catastrophic for the Russian military thus far. In almost seven months of war, the Russian forces have suffered one humiliating defeat after another, losing tens of thousands of troops in the process and thousands of pieces of equipment. As a result, the capabilities of the Russian military have been seriously degraded, and Moscow’s ability to fight the U.S. and NATO has been dramatically degraded.

Hello from the third National Conservatism conference, meeting in Miami. Gov. Ron DeSantis addressed the conference on the first night, and blew everyone away. It helped that he followed a dull but half-hysterical rant by Sen. Rick Scott, who fired a barrage of Republican cliches at the audience (watch it here). A conservative writer friend sitting across the room texted me during the speech to joke that this thing was so bad it's causing him to rethink all his convictions.

The European energy disaster gets worse by the day. Energy bills ten times higher than the year before threaten the closure of major industries and small businesses in Britain, Germany, and the rest of the E.U. The base case now seems to be that Europe will be almost entirely deprived of Russian gas during the forthcoming winter. Over the last several months, a series of retaliations—some European states refusing to pay for gas in rubles, various closures by Poland and Ukraine of the pipeline network—have been paired with Russian reductions (from 40 percent to 20 percent to 0 percent) of...

With just a few clicks you could be saving big on everything you need to buy from Amazon. It's really that easy. With inflation rising high, odds are you're looking for the best deal on all of your purchases to help make your dollar stretch a little farther. Some of your daily purchases may be necessities while others are nice-to-haves, and while your necessities take priority that doesn't mean you need to completely cut out everything else. Amazon sells hundreds of thousands of products at all different price points, some of which are on sale and some are not. Wouldn't...

VIDEO AT LINK................ Um, WHAT?? Welp, you have to be 30 to enter the Senate, which would mean he's at least 750, which puts him on the biblical par with Noah's father Lamech (777 years)... This would mean Joe entered the Senate in the Year of Our Lord 1302, when Edward I, also known as Edward Longshanks, was King of England. You know, the evil king from Braveheart? I mean, c'mon, we make a lot of references to Braveheart around here, but I didn't think we were being LITERAL. You may think this was a gaffe (one he never corrected),...

Pennsylvania Lt. Governor John Fetterman isn’t really running for U.S. Senate. He’s on the ballot. He’s doing some campaign stops. He’s dodging a debate against Dr. Mehmet Oz. But he’s just a placeholder. The real candidate that nobody outside of the powerbrokers in the Democrat Party know about is his radical leftist wife, Gisele Barreto Fetterman. The official candidate has been making the news lately with his odd behavior. Just before the primary election, he suffered a stroke and was away from the public eye for over a month. But now that he’s back on the campaign trail, a whole...

The Ukrainian army’s counteroffensive around the city of Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine starting on Sept. 6 destroyed half of the best tank division in the best tank army in the Russian armed forces. A hundred wrecked or captured tanks in a hundred furious hours. That’s how much destruction the Ukrainians inflicted on the Russian 4th Guards Tank Division, part of the elite 1st Guards Tank Army, the Russian army’s best armor formation. Now the 1st GTA is retreating north in order to preserve what remains of its front-line divisions. But the damage the tank army has suffered could have lasting...

The optics of President Biden's speech attacking MAGA Republicans last week have drawn criticism for inserting Marines into what was obviously a political speech rather than a presidential address to the nation. Even the usually reliable apologist for Democrat excesses CNN thought he had gone too far. Anchor Brianna Keilar observed that "the military is supposed to be apolitical. Positioning Marines in uniform behind President Biden for a political speech flies in the face of that." Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre defended the imagery as "appropriate for the occasion. Our democracy is under attack from an insidious domestic threat. The inclusion...

Another Russian energy boss has died in mysterious circumstances after "falling overboard" from a boat, according to local media reports. Ivan Pechorin's body was found washed up around 100 miles from Vladivostok in Russia's far east, on Monday after a two-day search, local outlet VL.ru reported. Pechorin fell off his moving boat on September 10 as it sailed near Russky Island, the outlet reported. He was the Aviation Director for Russia's Far East and Arctic Development Corporation (KRDV), which described his death as an "irreparable loss." The KRDV is President Vladimir Putin's project for developing the rich energy and mining...

Following a failed appeal, Ohio’s Oberlin College is finally set to pay $36.6 million in damages that the courts have awarded to a local bakery in a defamation case. In a Sept. 9 statement, Oberlin announced that it had “initiated” payments to Gibson’s Bakery, a 137-year-old, fifth-generation family business that was wrongfully accused of racial profiling after a shoplifting incident involving black students. In April, an Ohio appeals court upheld a jury’s finding that the college, in its handling of student protests over the 2016 incident, committed libel, slander, and interference with business relationships against the bakery. On Aug. 30,...

Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul threatened a wave of oversight on Wednesday after Dr. Anthony Fauci refused to disclose whether members of the FDA are receiving royalties from the companies that created the COVID-19 vaccines. Fauci was testifying before the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee when Paul asked whether there were any financial conflicts of interest between members of the FDA committee and big pharma. “We’ve been asking you and you refuse to answer whether anybody on the vaccine committees gets royalties from the pharmaceutical companies,” Paul said. “I asked you last time and what was your response? ‘We...

@cspan Complete exchange between Sen. @RandPaul and Dr. Anthony Fauci at Monkeypox hearing. Sen. Paul plays @cspanwj clip of Dr. Fauci. Fauci: "That film that you showed was really taken out of context...Reuters fact-checked, looked at that..." Paul: "Actually, words don't lie." Clip...

A reader writes: I live in a small city which doesn’t have many employment opportunities. The city has a high unemployment rate, and it’s rare to find work that isn’t in shops, farming, etc. Six years ago, the city council launched a project to fund start-up business ideas for marginalized individuals, including those with disabilities. One of these ideas has become extremely successful. It’s essentially four neurodivergent eccentrics who live every day like it’s Halloween. They are commissioned by various organizations around the state to create bespoke services and goods. They’ve attracted something of a following with projects coming in...

FEAST OF THE EXALTATION OF THE CROSS JOHN 3:13–17 Friends, today we celebrate the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. How strange this feast would have sounded to someone in the ancient world! The triumph of the cross! It would have been analogous to someone speaking today of the triumph of the electric chair or the exaltation of the noose. The cross terrified people in Greco-Roman times, and that was the point. The cross was state-sponsored terrorism, a form of capital punishment reserved for those who had in the most egregious ways undermined the authority of the Roman state. So why...

The far left is eager to repeal 2A. We are not as free as we think. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO), an organization headquartered all the way in Geneva, will be tracking all gun purchases made on credit. The ISO develops standard documentation that is globally recognized. Gun sales were previously listed as “general merchandise,” but the ISO is changing the code. If you purchase a gun through a credit card, an international agency will document the purchase. Cash is still an option for now, but I expect it will become increasingly difficult to gain access to firearms –...

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said Wednesday on his show “Morning Joe” that it was “obvious” former President Donald Trump could be charged with obstruction of justice based on the back and forth with the Department of Justice over classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago. Co-host Willie Geist asked, “The filing lays out again how long it took to get this stuff. It comes out in dribs and drabs. You get some of it in January, 15 boxes of highly classified material. That’s not all of it. They go back in June. They get 50 boxes. They say 50 boxes are remaining....

A 77-year-old man was attacked and killed Sunday by a wild kangaroo that authorities believe he kept as a pet at his home in southwest Australia, police said. His death marked the first fatal kangaroo attack in Australia in 86 years. A relative of the man found him with “serious injuries” on his property in Redmond, a semi-rural area about 250 miles southeast of Perth. Investigators believe the kangaroo turned on him and attacked him hours before he was found by his relative.