Free Republic

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Sen. Susan Collins didn’t vote for Donald Trump for president in 2016 or 2020, and the third time will not be the charm — because she is writing in Nikki Haley. “I publicly endorsed Nikki Haley, and I wanted her to win. She’s still my favorite candidate, and I think she could do a great job. She’s my choice, and that’s how I’m going to express it,” Collins told WMTW-TV. Collins said she “does not support the Democratic nominee either” and supports “some of President Trump’s policies.” However, she also said “a lot of it is...

WASHINGTON — As more and more Democrats call on President Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 race, members of the Congressional Black Caucus, a key group of allies on Capitol Hill, remain largely supportive of the president but concerned that the ongoing pressure may prove fatal for his campaign and damage the party overall. “I have loyalty to Biden, no question about it,” said longtime Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo. “As things stand, I want him to win. But if he says, ‘You know, I’ve been listening and chatting with people and I don’t want to go any further,’...

Sheriff Grady Judd is angry about illegals doing crimes in Polk County.

Suffice to say, all is not well for the Electric Vehicle (EV) industry these days. Despite ample subsidies from the federal government, EV sales are slumping. ... there have been numerous reports of people being trapped inside EVs due to dead batteries. In some of these cases, toddlers have been locked inside of sweltering cars. In one example, on June 20, Renee Sanchez was eager to take her two-year-old granddaughter to the Phoenix Zoo. Early that morning, Sanchez strapped the toddler into the backseat of her Model Y Tesla. After closing the rear door, Sanchez attempted to open the front...

Campaigners have uncovered worrying teaching materials for the Pentagon's 160 military schools that many service members may see as unpatriotic and even scary. Training manuals for its 8,000 teachers advise that Thanksgiving feasts have no historical basis and that America was founded on land 'stolen' from natives. Though uncontroversial for some, Adam Andrzejewski, who uncovered the documents via public records requests, calls it a 'perverse' way to teach kids of service members. His revelations come as Republicans and Democrats clash in the Senate over LGBTQ+ troops and other controversies in the $886 billion defense bill. Andrzejewski, head of the conservative...

Slowed speech, pauses, and using the same handful of words. If you've witnessed these habits in an elderly loved one, it could be an early warning sign of dementia. New research is beginning to untangle what the natural signs of aging look like and which could be due to serious brain conditions when it comes to how people talk. For example, forgetting the name of a person, place or having difficulty finding words is natural and linked to memory retrieval, which gets worse as we get older. However, this combined with slowed or slurring speech, blank pauses, and limited vocabulary...

Yeah, it’s happening. The last half of 2024 is shaping up to be one of the most politically insane in a century and the sparks are already flying. The biggest moment of absurdity so far might be the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, in which it was made abundantly clear for all the world to see that Biden is on the fast track to crazy town. We’ve been saying for four years that the guy is gone, a dementia case propped up and protected by the DNC and the media. Now, it’s undeniable:There’s a vegetable sitting...

Terrence does a Maxine Waters impersonation.

The United Kingdom has clarified that it has not granted permission for Ukraine to use Storm Shadow missiles inside Russian territory, contradicting earlier statements. This clarification has created an awkward diplomatic moment for Sir Keir Starmer, as reported by The Telegraph. Downing Street stated on 12 July that the government’s policy “had not changed” regarding the deployment of the long-range missiles. The British Government has allowed Kyiv to fire the missiles against targets in Crimea and mainland Ukraine since their delivery last year but has banned their use against targets inside Russia due to concerns about escalating the war. Zelenskyy...

HOUSTON — Half a million Texans are expected to suffer through sweltering heat with no electricity into early next week after Hurricane Beryl knocked out power throughout the Houston area Monday, generating anger at the region’s large utility for failing to defend the grid from a predictable summer storm. Food is spoiling in dormant refrigerators days after the Category 1 hurricane tore through power lines and utility poles. Hospitals are swarming with patients struggling with heat stroke. Businesses can’t function as residents are ordered to stay home, and many residents faced at least three or four more days of continued...

Grassroots group tells The Federalist the Jersey GOP is more interested in electing preferred governor candidate in 2025 than Trump in ’24.A conservative activist looking to get a ballot harvesting initiative up and running in New Jersey tells The Federalist that the state GOP is more interested in helping their preferred Republican gubernatorial candidate — marked as a “Never Trumper” — win in 2025 than helping the soon-to-be GOP presidential nominee take back the White House in November. Deep Blue New Jersey has a chance to turn red this election year, some very enthusiastic Republicans insist. But a local GOP...

In a shock to no one except perhaps some of the so-called "progressive" leftists who have become cheerleaders for Hamas and other Iran-backed terrorists, commandos in the Israel Defense Forces have discovered a Hamas command center and a cache of terrorist weapons inside the Gaza City headquarters of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). The discovery was made during an operation earlier this week and it's not the first time the IDF has found Hamas terrorists hiding their barbaric operations in, under, and around the UN agency headquarters. As The Times of Israel reminded, the IDF "raided the...

Kari Lake is appealing to the Arizona Supreme Court to have the courts reconsider her case over her 2022 gubernatorial election loss to Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) after a panel on the Court of Appeals tossed out her case last month. Lawyers for Lake wrote in their filing, obtained by Arizona’s Law, that a new election should be conducted or 275,000 ballots should be struck, which would deliver a victory for Lake, after claiming that “based on new information,” a majority of vote center tabulators in Maricopa County failed and “averaging over 7,000 ballot rejections every thirty minutes shortly after...

Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters is defending his decision to issue a directive that calls for the inclusion of the Bible in public school classrooms. Recently, Walters garnered national attention when he announced that he was changing public school social studies standards to make the Bible more of a focal point in the curriculum. In an interview with The Christian Post on Thursday, Walters defended his directive, explaining that “it is of the utmost importance that our kids get a full understanding of American history.” “Obviously, that includes the most read book in American history, the most purchased...

Talk about a mask-off moment. On Wednesday, the Democratic Socialists of America yanked their endorsement of progressive darling Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, bestowed just a week prior, for the sin of . . . acknowledging the reality of antisemitism within the pro-Palestine movement. The DSA’s national apparatus had tentatively given the endorsement June 23, on the condition that AOC completely toe the group’s line on Israel, which apparently means staying dead silent on the issue of rampant leftist Jew-hate. The group listed several supposed indiscretions in their indictment of AOC, including her vote affirming the Jewish state’s right to exist last...

I'm becoming increasingly convinced that this is an in-house coup. Remember, the Democrats have a very undemocratic nominating process. It doesn't really matter what their voters want. The superdelegates will pick the nominee. Bossism 101. Now, Trump's strength is that, right or wrong, he is perceived as anti-Establishment, as the guy standing up to drain the Swamp. How does a failing incumbent president get in on some of that? Now that there's been a movement to dump Biden, he can run against the Democrat Establishment (of which he is a longtime key member.) He can argue that the Establishment hates...

The COVID shot was put on trial in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and coming from California the result might surprise you. Three of four judges agree it was never a “traditional vaccine” and therefore could not legally be mandated. The case was against the Los Angeles Unified School District (“LAUSD”) that “required employees to get the COVID-19 vaccination or lose their jobs.” While this case was making its way thru the courts, LAUSD was playing Hokey-Pokey with their policy on “vaccination” which didn’t play well in their litigation strategy, as it allowed the case...

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), along with two other international consumer protection networks, announced on Thursday the results of a study into the use of “dark patterns” — or manipulative design techniques ... In an analysis of 642 websites and apps offering subscription services, the study found that the majority (nearly 76%) used at least one dark pattern and nearly 67% used more than one. Dark patterns refer to a range of design techniques that can subtly encourage users to take some sort of action or put their privacy at risk. They’re particularly popular among subscription websites and apps...

We’re learning something valuable. Censorship works better than gaslighting, but even that fails. Joe Biden’s “cognitive decline” has been ongoing since at least 2019. If you didn’t understand why Biden ran his 2020 campaign from his Wilmington rec room, now you know. COVID precaution was a convenient excuse. Biden wasn’t ever going to draw a crowd like Trump, so masking up and hanging out in front of his big screen was an easy dodge. But it was his deteriorating brain that kept him off the campaign trail. Dementia sufferers are easily confused and frustrated. They don’t handle crowds and noise...

SNIPTo prevent the attacks, Zelenskyy pushed for permission from the U.S. to use long-range weapons to target airfields hundreds of miles inside Russia.“We can protect our cities from Russian guided bombs if American leadership makes a step forward and allows us to destroy Russian military aircraft on their bases," he said.SNIPWhile praising American aid as a whole, he also framed American deliveries of 31 Abrams tanks, once the center of a major political push, as ultimately too few to make a difference. “I'm not sure that such a number of tanks can change the situation on the battlefield,” said Zelenskyy....