Free Republic

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says his country will file an expedited application to join NATO after Russian President Vladimir Putin signed treaties to annex parts of eastern Ukraine. In a statement, Zelensky called Ukraine and NATO “de facto” allies and said his country would seek formal membership in the alliance. “De facto, we have already proven interoperability with the Alliance’s standards, they are real for Ukraine — real on the battlefield and in all aspects of our interaction,” Zelensky said. “Today, Ukraine is applying to make it de jure. Under a procedure consistent with our significance for the protection of...

SACRAMENTO — Turns out “Sí, se puede” isn’t just a rallying cry. It’s a threat. Gov. Gavin Newsom just learned that the hard way. On Wednesday afternoon, after a morning of glory in which Newsom signed a number of important laws to break the logjam on affordable housing in California, word started leaking out that he would also put pen to paper on Assembly Bill 2183, a measure by the United Farm Workers meant to make it easier for those who labor in our fields to form a union. It’s a bill Newsom has fought against vehemently for months and...

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced on Friday that his nation has formally submitted an expedited application to become a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). NATO is an intergovernmental military alliance launched after World War II as a counter against Soviet aggression in Europe. The announcement occurs as the Russian invasion of Ukraine enters its seventh month. “Ukraine was and remains a leader in negotiation efforts. It was our state that always offered Russia to reach an agreement on coexistence on equal, honest, decent and fair terms,” Zelensky said in a video message. “It is obvious that this...

This list only includes destroyed vehicles and equipment of which photo or videographic evidence is available. Therefore, the amount of equipment destroyed is significantly higher than recorded here. Small arms, ATGMs, MANPADS, loitering munitions, drones used as unmanned bait, civilian vehicles, trailers and derelict equipment are not included in this list. All possible effort has gone into avoiding duplicate entries and discerning the status of equipment between captured or abandoned. Many of the entries listed as 'abandoned' will likely end up captured or destroyed. Similarly, some of the captured equipment might be destroyed if it can't be recovered. When the...

The CEO of a crisis pregnancy center in Buffalo, New York, says the police and FBI will not give back his surveillance footage from the night abortion extremists firebombed his facility because they are afraid it may inspire rightwing violence. The perpetrators have not been caught, and the FBI does not seem to have even investigated the act of pro-abort terrorism, nor any of the other acts of violence against pro-life centers and churches this year. Since May, there have been 98 attacks reported against churches, pro-life pregnancy centers, maternity homes, and other pro-life organizations, according to the Catholic News...

The core index of the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of inflation went up in August, despite a historically aggressive campaign of interest rate hikes intended to slow it. The Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index (PCE), which measures the value of goods and services purchased by “persons” residing in the U.S., was down slightly in August from 6.4% to 6.2% annually, but was higher than economists anticipated, according to CNBC. This decline was almost entirely off the back of falling energy prices, with so-called core PCE, which does not consider the more-volatile food and energy indices, increasing in August from 4.7%...

President Joe Biden is preparing to sign an executive order protecting 600,000 illegal immigrants from deportation, NBC News reported Thursday, citing “people close to the White House.” The move is being made in advance of a decision from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals regarding the future of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. DACA protects illegal immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children — so-called Dreamers — from deportation and allows them access to work permits. As of December 2021, 611,470 migrants were protected under the program, according to the Migration Policy Insitute. The Fifth...

Former President Bill Clinton said on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” podcast that “there is a limit” to how many migrants the United States can accept before it causes disruption. ZAKARIA: Let me ask you about another issue you guys are going to take up at CGI, refugees. And one of the things that I think the right has hammered at, with regard to the Democratic Party and President Biden, is this issue of refugees coming into the United States. And I think it’s fair to say that the asylum system seems to be broken. This was meant to be a...

We still have three daily newspapers here in New York — the Times, the Post, and the Daily News. I subscribe to the first two, but not to the Daily News. And I almost never read the Daily News either. From my occasional encounters, my observation is that the Daily News has completely gone over to wokism, and is just a cut-rate, slimmed-down version of the Times, pushing the progressive narrative on all issues without concern for evidence or facts. But like the Times, the Daily News can sometimes, undoubtedly inadvertently, shine a bright light on the twisted thinking of...

A quick study by two scientists calculates that climate change made Hurricane Ian 10% rainier than it would have been if there were no such thing as global warming. Climate change added at least 10% more rain to Hurricane Ian, a study prepared immediately after the storm shows. Thursday's research, which is not peer-reviewed, compared peak rainfall rates during the real storm to about 20 different computer scenarios of a model with Hurricane Ian's characteristics slamming into the Sunshine State in a world with no human-caused climate change. “The real storm was 10% wetter than the storm that might have...

Multiple experts contacted by Fox News Digital argued that there isn't sufficient evidence to suggest climate change caused Hurricane Ian or any individual natural disaster. The experts' comments come as a series of media outlets, Democrats and progressive commentators continue to blame the hurricane on human-caused global warming. Hurricane Ian slammed into southwest Florida as a Category 4 storm on Wednesday, causing more than a million residents to lose power and prompting stark safety warnings from Florida officials. "What they're trying to do is politicize the pain and suffering of these people to promote their green agenda," Gregory Wrightstone, the...

M&M’s, a Mars, Incorporated product, published a press release announcing a rebrand centered on the brand’s commitment to inclusion and global belonging. As another brand taking steps to increase societal impact (e.g., the effort includes creation of the M&M’S FUNd to track the brand’s impact on its mission, which will offer resources, mentorship, opportunities and financial support in the arts and entertainment space to help ensure people have access to experiences where everyone feels they belong), perhaps it is time to pause and reflect on the need for brands to make such a shift and then promote it. When the...

When Jon Stewart left the Daily Show in 2015, he averaged 1.3 million viewers per night. After seven years of humiliating failure, Stewart’s hand-picked replacement, some guy named Trevor Noah, is slinking off with an average viewership as of last week of 363,000 viewers. During his failed reign, I made something of a cottage industry ridiculing Stewart’s pathetic ratings. The corporate media bent over backward to juice the far-left and smugly dishonest Stewart into a national phenomenon when the truth was that less than one percent of Americans tuned in. Jon Stewart was a “phenomenon” in CNN’s eyes only, a...

'Anglo-Saxons' blew up Nord Stream and warns he'll use 'all forces' to defend annexed Ukraine regions Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered a scathing speech toward the West Claimed U.S. set 'precedent' using nuclear weapons against Japan during WWII Remarks were announcing and signing papers making his annexation of four Ukrainian regions official: Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Luhansk Fears of nuclear war have grown since Putin said he was 'not bluffing' Russia is prepared to use nuclear weapons to defend its territory The outlandish claims in the speech included insisting the U.S. is occupying Germany and Korea Also ranted about 'sex...

No good deed goes unpunished . . . particularly when it comes to the liberal media, and the person performing the good deeds is a top contender to wrest the White House from Democrat grip. Example A: this Politico magazine column by Politico's "senior media writer" Jack Shafer. Don't be fooled by the benign headline: "Ron DeSantis Shows Some Good Manners." You might anticipate an article praising Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for his admirable handling of Hurricane Ian. But to the contrary, Shafer's entire thrust is to cast DeSantis in the most cynical light.

The Biden administration announced it would again reduce payments to Medicare physicians, this time by 8.42 percent. According to a recent survey, 92 percent of medical group practices report that Medicare payments do not cover the cost of providing care. The federal government can stay in business when it takes in less revenue than it expends. Why? Because it can print money and no one else can. To stay in business, physicians will have to reject Medicare patients; access will decrease once again. And with Democrats pushing legislation like the wrongly named Inflation Reduction Act, things will only get worse....

What Baseball Has Done to Baseball, in 25 words or fewer: The winner is reader John Fleming, who submitted, “It is really sad seeing one entire side of the infield open while a .188 hitter tries to hit a home run.” Sad, pathetic, self-destructive, mindless, idiotic, senseless, ludicrous. Take your pick, collect them all, trade ’em with your friends. Every baseball fan who realizes that the fastest way back to home plate is to first reach first base, preferably by running there, by now recognizes that some analytics are, at best, junk science, and at worst, a coast-to-coast con. Instead...

A massive billboard ad in Phoenix is thanking Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) for keeping the southern border open to invasion from illegal migrants. “Thank you, Mark Kelly, for voting to keep our borders open,” the billboard reads. “The drugs aren’t going to smuggle themselves.” The ad says it was paid for by Citizens for Sanity. According to its website, the group’s mission is “to return common sense to America, to highlight the importance of logic and reason, and to defeat ‘wokeism’ and anti-critical thinking ideologies.” Democrat Kelly and the Biden administration have allowed nearly 2 million illegal migrants into the...

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed treaties on Friday to annex four Ukrainian regions partly occupied by his forces, escalating his seven-month war and taking it into an unpredictable new phase."This is the will of millions of people," he said in a speech before hundreds of dignitaries in the St George's Hall of the Kremlin. "People living in Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson region and Zaporizhzhia region are becoming our compatriots forever."At a ceremony that Kyiv called a "Kremlin freak show" devoid of legal meaning, Putin delivered a 37-minute diatribe against the West, accusing it of "sheer Satanism," before signing the treaty documents...

The counties where former president Donald Trump won in the 2020 election are collectively seeing stronger labor markets in the Biden economy, according to a new report from the Economic Innovation Group (EIG).In these counties, manufacturing, energy, and agriculture sectors are a disproportionate share of their economies, and the workforce is more blue collar.The Democrat counties, by contrast, are in key business districts and are seeing fewer jobs, partly explained by the rise of remote work. Local businesses there have also suffered. In these generally urban counties, the jobs are more likely to be white collar in nature and can...