Free Republic

President-elect Donald J. Trump has promised to unravel President Biden’s major legislation when he takes office next month, but Mr. Biden is hoping to salvage his most prized policies with help from an unlikely source: Republicans.With just weeks left in office, Mr. Biden and his aides have emphasized that his signature economic legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, overwhelmingly benefits Republican districts, in the hopes that Mr. Trump would face blowback from his own party if he repealed it.The administration is also racing to award hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and finalize environmental regulations to lock in Mr. Biden’s...

NEW YORK (AP) — Jurors began deliberating Tuesday in the trial of a military veteran charged with using a fatal chokehold to subdue a man whose behavior was alarming passengers on a New York subway train. The anonymous jury is weighing manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide charges in the death of Jordan Neely, a troubled street performer who was homeless. The veteran, Daniel Penny, has pleaded not guilty. Penny, 26, has said he was protecting fellow subway riders and intended only to restrain Neely and hold him for police, not to hurt him. Prosecutors say the Marine veteran used far...

Belyatskaya, a Russian-born tourist vacationing in Thailand with her boyfriend, was unexpectedly struck by the wave Friday afternoon. The footage showed her struggling against the currents and succumbing to the frothing waters. A bystander went into the water to attempt to save her but was unsuccessful. His fate is currently unknown, the outlet said.

Russia could end the war in Ukraine with a nuclear strike that turns the country into a "radiation zone", an ally of Vladimir Putin has chillingly warned. Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeyev warned that the world is "on the brink of nuclear war". Discussing the prospect of a Russian nuclear strike on Ukraine, he added: "There will be a radiation zone nobody will ever go into in our lifetime. And the war will be over." -snip- He added: "We want a long-term peace — some sort of general agreement about the global order. Trump wants to go down in history, he'll...

Several liberal women have gotten sterilized or plan to, blaming their decision to become infertile on Donald Trump winning the 2024 presidential election. In interviews with Newsweek, the women, including an OnlyFans model, said they are afraid of their “reproductive rights” being taken away once Trump becomes president again. Trump has repeatedly said he believes abortion is a states issue, although his left-wing opponents have baselessly claimed that he will ban abortion nationwide. Eden Ixora, 25, of Florida, who reportedly creates content for OnlyFans, said, “the idea of getting pregnant is worse than death.” She told the outlet she is...

BREAKING: A judge in Georgia just ordered Fani Willis to release all communications she had with Jack Smith and the January 6th Committee to plot the RICO case against President Trump. The court also declared that she violated Georgia's Open Records Law. "The Court also hereby ORDERS Defendant to conduct a diligent search of her records for responsive materials within five business days of the entry of this Order. Within that same five day period, Defendant is ORDERED to provide Plaintiff with copies of all responsive records that are not legally exempted or excepted from disclosure." Big shout-out to -...

An Indianapolis man who went out to pick up some packages stumbled across two baby girls abandoned in a ditch in below-freezing temperatures after their family car was stolen, police said. Robert Deane had gone out of his house to check if his mail arrived Monday morning when he spotted two car seats tossed in a local ditch, with two infants, 4- and 5-month-olds, crying for help. “One of them was screaming, so I immediately grabbed the car seats, brought them inside,” he told local CBS 4. “We got them warmed up and called 911.”

Ireland’s election looks set to have secured victory for the incumbent center-right parties which have dominated the country’s politics for nearly a century, signaling continuity for the business community but belying broad dissatisfaction with many social issues. Fianna Fáil, led by Micheál Martin, and Fine Gael, helmed by Simon Harris, by midday Monday appeared able to form a coalition just shy of a parliamentary majority in the 174-seat Dáil, and are widely expected to seek backing from one or two smaller opposition parties to form a government. A key question will be who takes on the role of taoiseach, the...

...Trump was a threat to business as usual. Thus, a cabal of intelligence agencies cooperated to stop him from making changes to foreign policy or scrutinizing the outsized military-industrial complex. Contrary to the media’s dire pronouncements, these insiders were the real threat to democracy and self-government. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, was one of the worst offenders. As documented in Bob Woodward’s book Peril, Milley spent a lot of time after the 2020 election caballing with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and reassuring her that the military would resist certain orders from President Trump. He...

French President Emmanuel Macron has vowed that he will not resign no matter the result of Wednesday’s no confidence vote in Prime Minister Michel Barnier, which is likely to collapse the second Macronist government this year. Speaking from the sidelines on his trip to Saudi Arabia, during which France has descended into outright political chaos, President Macron reaffirmed his plans to serve out the remainder of his second term, which is planned to run until April of 2027. In his first comments since the planned no confidence vote in his prime minister was announced, President Macron said per Le Figaro:...

Notable Birthdays for December 3 Henry A. Wise (1806-1876) - The 33rd Governor of Virginia. Thomas Alfred Davies (1809-1899) - Brevet Major General of the Union Army. George B. McClellan (1826-1885) - The 24th Governor of NJ. Cleveland Abbe (1838-1916) - Considered the Father of Weather Bureau. Phoebe Hearst (1842-1919) - Founder of the University of California Museum of Anthropology. Charles Alfred Pillsbury (1842-1899) - Founder of the Pillsbury Company. Ellen Swallow Richards (1842-1911) - Founder of the home economics movement. Mildred Wiley (1901-2000) - Olympic bronze medal winner of the high jump. Len Lesser (1922-2011) - Actor remembered for...

YMCA singer Victor Willis has U-turned on his opposition to Donald Trump using the song in his rallies - while urging fans not to call it a 'gay anthem'. The 73-year-old founding member of Village People band previously urged the incoming president to stop playing their 1978 disco hit at his political demos. But on Sunday Willis changed his tune, saying he 'didn't have the heart' to continue fighting Trump's team after seeing how much the president-elect 'seems to genuinely like YMCA'. The airtime has pushed the song towards the top of the Billboard charts.

Illegal immigration cost American taxpayers a whopping 2.6 percent of the entire U.S. government's $6.1 trillion in federal spending for the entire 2023 fiscal year. This amounts to $150.7 billion, according to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy's new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). If the figure is correct, the staggering sum of money going toward illegal immigrants entering and living in the U.S. would rival spending across some other agencies.

Controversial billionaire Mark Cuban has floated the idea of running for president with Charles Barkley after insisting the NBA legend is 'somebody America needs'. Cuban, who was a surrogate for Kamala Harris before the Democratic nominee lost this month's election, has been tipped to make a run for the White House in previous election cycles but is yet to throw his name into the hat. During an appearance on The Steam Room podcast with Barkley and host Ernie Johnson, the minority Dallas Mavericks owner was asked about the tribalism in American politics and how the country can begin to have...

Nothing can be said for certain, except death, taxes — and now, speculation about AOC running for president. The latest round comes courtesy of a Black Friday story in The Hill about contenders for the Democratic nomination in 2028. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was thrown in as the 11th and last name, a fun little kicker. “She’s somebody who can cut through the noise and doesn’t talk like Washington,” an anonymous Democratic strategist told The Hill. AOC for president hype started three weeks after she first took office in 2019 when Axios found three-quarters of Dems would consider voting for her...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) vented his displeasure Monday after two Democratic-appointed federal judges reversed their decisions to retire in what appear to be efforts to stop President-elect Trump from nominating their successors. McConnell called the unusual decisions to forgo retirement following Trump’s sweeping victory last month a “partisan” gambit that would undermine the integrity of federal courts. “They rolled the dice that a Democrat could replace them and now that he won’t, they’re changing their plans to keep a Republican from doing it,” McConnell said on the Senate floor. “It’s a brazen admission. And the incoming administration would...

ALBANY, N.Y. (WCAX) - New York on Jan. 1 will become the first state to require employers to provide up to 20 hours of paid time off during pregnancy. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said the goal of the program is to make sure expecting mothers don’t have to decide between losing pay and missing appointments. “That means they can not be missing the prenatal appointments — which are so important for a mom’s health to keep a regularly scheduled appointment with her doctor to make sure that if anything is going wrong with her health or the baby’s, they’re...

The United States will provide more than $1 billion in humanitarian aid for people displaced by drought or conflict in 31 African countries, US President Joe Biden said in Angola Tuesday. The assistance would address food insecurity and other urgent needs of refugees, internally displaced persons and affected communities in 31 African countries, a statement from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) added. "Today, I'm announcing over $1 billion of new humanitarian support for Africans displaced from homes by historic droughts," Biden said in an address in the Angolan capital Luanda, where he arrived late Monday for his...

On Monday on CNN’s “News Central,” former German Chancellor Angela Merkel told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that President-elect Donald Trump was fascinated by dictators’ power. Amanpour asked, “I remember very distinctly when Donald Trump was first elected. You did one– You were the only one to actually welcome his election conditionally. In other words, based on the respect and the adherence to mutual values, democracy, freedom, diversity, rule of law, human rights, etc. And I just wonder whether you thought he did act in that way, and especially because you said he was clearly fascinated by the Russian president. ‘In the...

A congressional subcommittee concluded its two-year investigation on the coronavirus pandemic on Monday, finding that COVID-19 likely originated from a lab in Wuhan, China, and that social distancing and masking were not backed with scientific data. The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released its final 520-page report that stated "COVID-19 most likely emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China." In support of the "lab leak" theory, the report said the subcommittee learned that the virus had a biological characteristic that is not found in nature and that data showed all COVID-19 cases stemming from a single introduction to humans....