Free Republic

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) in an interview published Monday said he believes Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) will be remembered “poorly,” while noting he could save some of his reputation by getting “the old Republican Party back.” Schumer told Punchbowl News that he has recently been “more friendly” with McConnell in light of the Republican’s efforts to shore up GOP votes for bipartisan legislation under President Biden, including the most recent aid package for Ukraine. This, however, may not have been enough to change McConnell’s legacy, Schumer added.

The sudden, percussive crackle came as Barb Berlin was standing in the garage of her farmhouse near Inman, Nebraska. “I thought it was a gun,” she said. Then came a streak of white. She realized the sound wasn’t gunfire but hail. This year, amid a spring and summer of extreme weather, hail — not hurricanes, floods or tornadoes — has caused the highest damage costs in the U.S., according to Gallagher Re, a global reinsurance firm that tracks such data. And research suggests that large hailstones like the ones Berlin saw Monday will become more common as Earth warms. That...

President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris plan to meet in the White House Situation Room on Monday with the US hostage deal negotiating team after the murder of six hostages, including American citizen Hersh Goldberg-Polin, by Hamas on Saturday. The White House said the focus of the meeting is to discuss efforts to drive toward a deal that secures the release of the remaining hostages. The meeting is closed to the press. Mobs of protesters took to the streets in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and other cities Sunday after the bodies of the hostages in Gaza were returned to Israel,...

A programmer had hard-coded the Ukrainian national anthem into the voter database in the US state of New Hampshire, media reported, citing a cybersecurity firm which found troubling security bugs written into the database. During the project of replacing the state's outdated voter registration database before the 2024 election, some tasks of the project have been outsourced, which meant unknown programmers outside the US could have access to the software.

The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution undisputedly protects the individual right to own and carry firearms for self-defense, sport, and other uses. But the amendment actually says nothing about guns; it refers to "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms," of which firearms are just one example of what dictionaries define as "a means (such as a weapon) of offense or defense." In Massachusetts, last week, that resulted in a decision by the state's highest court striking down a law against switchblade knives.Protected by the Second Amendment "We conclude switchblades are not 'dangerous and unusual'...

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — An official investigation into the helicopter crash in May that killed Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi and seven other people found it was caused by challenging climatic and atmospheric conditions, Iranian state TV reported Sunday. The final report of the Supreme Board of the General Staff of the Armed Forces said the main cause of the helicopter crash was the complex climatic conditions of the region in spring, state TV said. The report also cited the sudden appearance of a thick mass of dense fog rising upwards as the helicopter collided with the mountain. According to the...

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Police used a tanklike vehicle with a battering ram to smash into a Southern California home and arrest the next-door neighbor of a couple living in a nudist community who were reported missing earlier this week, officials said Friday. Officials believe the bodies of Stephanie Menard, 73, and her husband, Daniel, 79, are inside the residence, though they first have to shore up the home to make it safe to search, said Carl Baker, spokesperson for the Redlands Police Department. Michael Royce Sparks, 62, was booked into jail for investigation of homicide Thursday night after being...

A former Walmart worker who was part of a theft-busting duo known as “Starsky & Hutch’’ was stabbed by a suspected shoplifter — and says the company betrayed him by firing him afterward. John Zalesky, 67, of Aurora, Colo., told The Post that he was so good at spotting shifty thieves during his 10-month tenure at a store in nearby Centennial that he and another eagle-eyed cashier nicknamed themselves after the TV crime-fighting duo — and Walmart even hailed him once with an award. “In 10 months, I stopped well over 100 people,” Zalesky said recently, adding that his work...

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, released an ad on Saturday urging Americans to vote for Donald Trump to help RFK Jr. “finish the story” his uncle and father started. The ad, which runs for over five minutes, begins with footage of President Dwight D. Eisenhower warning about the political power of the “military-industrial complex.”

On August 26, 2021, 13 service members were killed by bomb during the Biden/Harris panic withdrawal from Afghanistan. Three years later Gold Star families invited Donald Trump to participate in commemoration of their losses. Kamala Harris took a cheap shot at Trump for his visit: Vice President Kamala Harris slammed former President Donald Trump’s controversial photo-op at Arlington National Cemetery with Gold Star families on Monday, claiming he “disrespected sacred ground.” Even though he was invited by Gold Star families, Democratic presidential nominee accused Trump of staging a “political stunt” after his campaign staff got into an altercation with a...

Six people have been injured in a Labor Day shooting at a Tennessee lounge bar, police said. The incident occurred at the SkyBar & Lounge at 825 Hamilton Crossings in Antioch, around 3 a.m. Monday, according to the Metro Nashville Police Department. Police said shots were fired in the parking lot of the lounge.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced it was giving a private, historically black university in New Orleans a $19.9 million grant, some of which will be used to buy electric bikes for 300 families.

After eight decades of dormancy, the US Marines have restored a historic World War II airstrip on Peleliu, a small island that is part of the Pacific nation Palau. This strategic move, completed after months of repairs by US naval engineers, saw the landing of a KC-130J long-range tanker aircraft on June 22. The move comes amid escalating tensions between China on one side, and Taiwan and the US on the other. The Peleliu airstrip is one of several bases the Americans are eyeing or have already prepared in the context of growing tensions in the South China Sea and...

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s name is likely to remain on the ballot in key states in November in what could inadvertently threaten former President Trump despite the independent candidate suspending his campaign and endorsing Trump. Kennedy said he would push to be removed from the ballot in battlegrounds that will help determine who wins the White House, but as of now, officials say voters will see him appear as a candidate in Michigan, Wisconsin and North Carolina when they head to the polls. Polls had shown Kennedy draining support from Trump before he suspended his bid, raising the likelihood that...

“This article was originally published by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative news outlet and magazine. Sign up for their weekly newsletter, or follow them on Facebook and X.” (Required for republishing) Everything is bigger in Texas—including state police contracts for surveillance tech. In June, the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) signed an acquisition plan for a 5-year, nearly $5.3 million contract for a controversial surveillance tool called Tangles from tech firm PenLink, according to records obtained by the Texas Observer through a public information request. The deal is nearly twice as large as the company’s $2.7 million two-year...

Vice President Kamala Harris told a voter in Savannah, Georgia, last week that she made so many collard greens for a friend’s Christmas party that she washed them in the bathtub. “I have a friend who had a Christmas Party Christmas Eve every year, and she asked me to make the greens for her party every year. And I am not lying to you, that I would make so many greens, that I’d need to wash them in the bathtub. I’m telling you the truth.” Harris said.

I have had many posts on the soaring consumer electricity costs suffered by the residents of those jurisdictions that have proceeded furthest down the road to all-renewable power. These are places like Germany, the UK, and California, where consumer electricity prices are double to triple the U.S. average. But is that difference the result of their race to convert to wind and solar electricity generation, or does it stem instead from “bad luck,” or something else? Even as electricity prices in many of these places soar, advocates of wind and solar generation continue to claim that those resources are cheaper...

The never-ending feud between former President Donald Trump and Rosie O’Donnell heated up again over the weekend when the actress spread the conspiracy theory that a would-be assassin’s bullet did not strike Trump’s ear during a failed attempt on his life. Rosie shared her theory on TikTok and demanded further investigations into the matter. “I don’t know what happened that day,” O’Donnell said. “But I don’t think it was a bullet that him. I don’t. I think it was maybe a fragment of something. But I don’t know. Without a scar to be seen yet blood all over it.”

Labor Day is a U.S. national holiday held the first Monday every September. Unlike most U.S. holidays, it is a strange celebration without rituals, except for shopping and barbecuing. For most people it simply marks the last weekend of summer and the start of the school year.The holiday’s founders in the late 1800s envisioned something very different from what the day has become. The founders were looking for two things: a means of unifying union workers and a reduction in work time.History of Labor DayThe first Labor Day occurred in 1882 in New York City under the direction of that...

Right-wingers and populists have devastated legacy left-wing parties in two state elections in Germany, even if a “software error” in one state was blamed for changing the initial official results, taking two seats away from the right. The right-populist anti-mass migration Alternative for Germany (AfD) has won a state election for the first time, taking 32.8 per cent of the vote in east Germany’s Thuringia. Counts in the AfD’s favour continued to roll in from the evening, building its lead from earlier declarations. The result gives the party 32 seats in the Free State’s 88-seat parliament, the Landtag, far short...