Free Republic

The midterm clusterfark has drawn plenty of hot takes and instant analyses that range from insightful to self-serving to unbelievably stupid. But now that we have gotten past the initial blasts of the flamethrower, perhaps we should take a breath and sit down, and think about where we are as a movement and what we need to do as a party for 2024. There’s a lot to talk about, from procedural questions like how we intend to cope with the new world of extended mail voting to substantive imperatives like how we must repeal the 19th Amendment as it applies...

Nassau, Bahamas — FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried has put his Bahamas penthouse up for sale for about $40 million after he lost billions in net worth amid the collapse of his crypto exchange. A real estate broker for the 12,000-square feet, five-bedroom residence in the luxury Albany resort said Monday the penthouse was put up for sale in the last week but declined to name the owner. People close to current and former FTX employees who have been at the residence confirmed it is Bankman-Fried’s place. He and other senior colleagues at FTX live and work in the penthouse, which...

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday declined to block the release of Arizona Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward’s phone records to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. The justices rejected an emergency request filed by Ward, meaning that phone records associated with her T-Mobile cellphone will be disclosed to the House committee. Two conservative justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, noted in the brief order that they would have granted the application. Liberal Justice Elena Kagan last month temporarily prevented the subpoena from being enforced while the justices weighed what steps to take. Ward...

Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 @JackPosobiec This is one of those headlines you have to read a few times bc it doesn't seem possible and yet here we are Maricopa election officials launched PAC in 2021 to stop MAGA candidates 9:32 AM · Nov 14, 2022 ·

After multiple delays due to hydrogen fuel leaks and other glitches, along with the rocket’s nail-biting brush with Hurricane Nicole last week, NASA managers met Sunday to review launch preparations and agreed to start a 47-hour 10-minute countdown at 1:54 a.m. EST Monday. Launch is planned for 1:04 a.m. Wednesday. But high winds from Nicole caused a thin strip of caulk-like material known as RTV to delaminate and pull away from the base of the Orion crew capsule’s protective nose cone at the top of the rocket. The material is used to fill in a slight indentation where the fairing...

Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is among a group of 59 influential conservative power brokers who signed an open letter pressing Republican leaders in the House and Senate to delay their internal conference leadership elections. “The Republican Party needs leaders who will confidently and skillfully present a persuasive coherent vision of who we are, what we stand for, and what we will do. Many current elections are still undecided. There should be no rushed leadership elections,” the letter says.

Michelle Obama says six years after Donald Trump’s White House win, his victory “still hurts.” “It felt like something more something much uglier than a simple political defeat,” Obama said in a clip from the audio version of her forthcoming book, “The Light we Carry,” published Monday by NPR. The part-self-help book, part-memoir is poised to be released on Tuesday. “I couldn’t help but return to the choice our country had made to replace Barack Obama with Donald Trump. What were we to take from that?” Obama said. “Barack and I always tried to operate on the principles of hope...

'Obviously, just the optics of it looks bad,' Kari Lake says ... Republican Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake took issue with her Democrat opponent not recusing herself as Arizona’s chief election officer amid days of election officials counting ballots. "We called for her to recuse herself July of last year of 2021, right after we got into the race, recognizing that there's a major ethical problem there. Obviously, just the optics of it looks bad. And she didn't do that," Kari Lake said on Fox News’ "Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo." "Even though many people been calling for her...

Leaving aside The Orange Devil Incarnate, the Republican the liberal media has most loved to hate during this election cycle is Kari Lake. And so, it was stunning to hear on today's Morning Joe what could be described as muted praise for the GOP nominee for the Arizona governorship. Granted, the praise didn't emanate from a wellspring of bonhomie by the panel. Rather, it was in reaction to Lake herself softening her tone regarding allegations of corruption in vote counting.Get the rest of the story and view the video here.

President Joe Biden on Monday acknowledged that his promise to legalize abortion nationwide would not come to fruition in the next Congress. “I don’t think there’s enough votes to codify,” Biden said at a press conference in Bali, Indonesia after a reporter asked him about the future of his promises on abortion. The president made the issue of legalizing abortion nationwide a critical part of his midterm campaign message.

NASA’s Artemis program took an important step forward this weekend, with CAPSTONE finally reaching its destination—a near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) around the Moon. The 55-pound cubesat will now test this promising orbit in preparation for the Gateway lunar space station. CAPSTONE, short for Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment, reached NRHO on Sunday, November 13, according to an Advanced Space press release. Later this week, the $33 million cubesat will attempt a pair of tiny clean-up maneuvers to confirm its placement in the lunar orbit. In addition to being the first human-built device to operate in NRHO,...

The definition of “woke” changes depending on who you ask. The term has been used by some conservatives as an insult against progressive values, as seen this midterm election cycle. However, the term was originally coined by progressive Black Americans and was used in racial justice movements in the early to mid-1900s, being used in a historical recording of the protest song, “Scottsboro Boys” by Lead Belly. In that recording, it was used as a term about staying aware of the potential for racist violence as a Black person in America. The term, in one of its contemporary meanings, began...

…. Every year in Colorado, thousands of ballots are reportedly rejected for issues related to signature verification, like a missing signature or a discrepancy in the signature. Local officials then alert voters of the issue, giving them a week time to fix the problem and make their vote count

A demonstration in the streets of Moscow reportedly shows Russians calling for Vladimir Putin to launch a nuclear strike on Washington, D.C. "Meanwhile in Russia: a rally, demanding for Moscow to strike Washington," Russian state TV blogger Julia Davis tweeted with a video of the demonstration. "They cite Putin's words: "We will go to heaven as martyrs and they will simply croak." The video shows a man chanting to the sounds of drums beating. "Strike the decision-making centers!" a translation of his words read on the chyron. "On Washington!" the marchers replied, according to the translation.

Shares of Amazon were down about 2.5% Monday. The cuts would be the largest in the company's history, and would primarily impact Amazon's devices organization, retail division and human resources, according to the report. The reported layoffs would represent less than 1% of Amazon's global workforce and 3% of its corporate employees.

Daniel Lacalle wrote a nice piece about disastrous Keynesian policies that led the US with high debt, inflation and weak wage growth. The main problem of the past decades, but particularly since 2008, is that government spending and monetary policy have become solutions of first resort to any slump in economic activity, even if that decline was created by government decisions, such as shutting down the economy due to a health crisis. Furthermore, government spending increases and loose monetary policy continued even in growth periods. This, in turn, creates an unsustainable public deficit that needs to be monetized or refinanced....

The October inflation print gave investors a reason to cheer, given its implications for the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy. Ark Invest founder Cathie Wood took to Twitter Saturday to offer her take on the inflation outlook. A Serious Policy Mistake: Inflation is unwinding, Wood said. If her deduction is true, the economy could be heading back to the future with the “Roaring Twenties,” the last time several general-purpose technologies, namely the telephone, electricity, and the internal combustion engine, evolved at the same time, she said, adding the setup is remarkably similar. Prior to the Roaring Twenties, there was World War...

Owens said there was a shift towards the end of Trump's presidency, and she blamed the COVID-19 pandemic for handcuffing Trump. She warned that Trump shutting down the government could have long-term ramifications. During her interview with Trump in December 2021, Candace confronted the former president about the COVID-19 vaccine. Owens asked Trump where he stands on the vaccine mandates. He replied, "People have to have their freedom," and then touted the COVID-19 vaccine as "one of the greatest achievements of mankind." Addressing why Trump hasn't acknowledged reports of possible efficacy issues with the COVID-19 vaccine, Owens theorized, "I believe...

Attacks on Donald Trump have begun in the aftermath of the midterm elections. We should have set our watches. Washington’s Republican establishment is pushing the line that the GOP’s underperformance in the midterms is “100%” Trump’s fault. Of course, there’s no stink on D.C. Republicans -- not Kevin McCarthy, not Mitch McConnell, not Ronna McDaniel, not Tom Emmer (chairman, RNCC), not GOP consultants and pollsters… Not on any Republican who hangs out at the Capitol Hill Club. Conservatives shouldn’t be goaded into a Trump versus DeSantis fight. Trump and DeSantis shouldn’t permit themselves to be baited, either. It’s so transparent,...

Former president Donald Trump chided Jewish American Democrats who oppose him despite his support for Israel, and hailed the Jewish state as a “modern-day miracle.” Speaking at the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) 2022 Gala in New York City, Trump said, “The United States and Israel are not just allies on a military basis, but economically and politically; we’re allies morally, culturally and spiritually and we always will be — at least if I have anything to do about it.”