Free Republic

CHICAGO (AP) — Storming an apartment complex by helicopter as families slept. Deploying chemical agents near a public school. Handcuffing a Chicago City Council member at a hospital.Activists, residents and leaders say increasingly combative tactics used by federal immigration agents are sparking violence and fueling neighborhood tensions in the nation’s third-largest city.“They are the ones that are making it a war zone,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said Sunday on CNN. “They fire tear gas and smoke grenades, and they make it look like it’s a war zone.”More than 1,000 immigrants have been arrested since an immigration crackdown started last month...

President Donald Trump on Sunday blasted a federal judge who blocked his deployment of Oregon National Guard troops, while repeatedly referring to her as a man. Trump appointed U.S. District Judge Karin J. Immergut, who on Saturday rejected the federal government’s assertion that Portland faced a “danger of rebellion” and that “regular forces” were unable to execute federal law. Speaking outside the White House, Trump said Immergut “ought to be ashamed of himself.” “I wasn’t served well by the people that pick judges. I can tell you things like that are just too bad. I appointed the judge and he...

"It’s written in black and white — Page 57, Section 2141 of Chuck Schumer’s counterproposal. Republicans made it illegal for Medicaid to reimburse care for illegal aliens at higher rates than for U.S. citizens. Democrats are now demanding to reverse that," Johnson wrote on X House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., on Sunday rejected Senate Democrats' who are claiming they are not seeking to allow illegal immigrants to receive health care as a condition for continuing government funding to end the shutdown."As a condition for ending the Democrat shutdown, Democrats want hospitals paid MORE to treat illegal aliens than American...

A 41-year-old man was arrested on Sunday outside the Cathedral of Saint Matthew the Apostle in Washington, D.C., on charges of possessing a Molotov cocktail and making threats to kidnap or injure people, according to police. The incident comes one week after a man rammed his pickup truck into the front of a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Grand Blanc, Michigan, and opened fire with an assault rifle, killing four worshipers and injuring eight others. The suspect was killed in a shootout with police after he set the chapel on fire, burning it to the ground, authorities...

A 41-year-old New Jersey man was arrested outside Saint Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, D.C., on Sunday for allegedly possessing a Molotov cocktail, authorities said. Louis Geri, of Vineland, had set up a tent on the steps of the Cathedral, which was due to hold its annual Red Mass, the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) said in a news release. Red Mass is a Catholic Mass that celebrates the start of the judicial year and offers prayers for wisdom, counsel, and fortitude for judges, lawyers and public officials. Officers assigned to a detail for the Red Mass spotted Geri and his tent...

After months of emergency rulings, the justices will be asked to render final verdicts on economic and immigration policies at the core of Trump’s presidency.The Supreme Court and President Donald Trump are headed for a reckoning.After months of terse emergency rulings that largely avoided major confrontations with the new administration, the justices will open their new term Monday faced with the need to render full, final verdicts on policies at the core of Trump’s presidency.“It really is going to be a showdown,” said Jennifer Nou, a law professor at the University of Chicago. “So many of the president’s big-ticket constitutional...

Preschoolers with LGBTQ parents or who identify as LGBTQ can't be shut out of religious preschools that are part of Colorado's state-funded preschool program, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday. The decision, which upholds a key part of a lower court decision, represents a major win for the state and a defeat for the two Denver-area Catholic preschools at the center of the case. Tuesday's decision provides the latest answer to a question being asked in several cases percolating in state and federal courts: Can private religious schools that accept public education dollars refuse to enroll certain kids based on...

Lawyers have a notoriously bad (and often well-earned) reputation. But one thing you have to hand them is this: If there's a loophole, they'll find it. Such appears to be the case with those advising the Trump administration as it navigates the bevy of lawsuits filed in an effort to #ResistWeMuch its efforts to enforce immigration law and restore law and order to a number of blue cities and states. As Jennifer Oliver O'Connell reported, on Saturday, an Oregon district court judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking the administration's deployment of 200 National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon. n...

Doesn’t Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth realize that push-ups are passé? His speech to an audience of generals he’d summoned to Washington has mystified and outraged critics who think his obsession with physical fitness is out-of-date at best and ridiculous at worst.“Frankly, it’s tiring to look out at combat formations, or really any formation, and see fat troops,” Hegseth told the assembled brass. “Likewise, it’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon.”“Today, at my direction, every member of the joint force, at every rank, is required to take a PT test twice a year,...

Great speech from President Trump on Navy 250 Birthday.

More than 44,000 people have signed a petition calling on Meta to restore wrongfully disabled accounts, citing automated decisions, unhelpful support, and having to pay to speak with a human.A Maryland college student is battling to restore her Instagram account after Meta accused her of violating policies on child sexual exploitation, abuse, and nudity — claims she calls false, hurtful, and baseless. Mackenzie Blake, who wants to be a teacher, discovered last month that she couldn't log into her Instagram account. Instead, she saw a message saying her account was suspended for a rule banning Instagram users from interacting or...

Senator Chuck Schumer and Speaker Mike Johnson each accused the other of not being “serious” about talks to end the shutdown as the government was closed for a fifth day.President Trump remained focused on blaming Democrats and repeating his threats to carry out mass firings of federal workers on Sunday, the fifth day of the government shutdown. Mr. Trump, speaking at the White House before attending an event in Virginia for the 250th anniversary of the Navy, insisted that Democrats would be to blame if he moved forward with job reductions that could be in the thousands. “Anybody laid off,...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Political leaders in Washington are spending considerable energy blaming the other party for what could be an extended government shutdown, and that effort includes shaping the narrative for next year’s elections.The Democratic campaign arm for House members has taken out digital ads in 35 districts it considers competitive. The ads accuse the Republicans of “standing in the way of affordable health care — on purpose.” The ads align with Democratic insistence that their health coverage concerns be addressed as part of a bill to fund the government, a demand Republicans have rejected. A Democratic-aligned group, House Majority...

“A South Carolina judge's beautiful beachfront home was burned to the ground on Saturday morning, sending three of her family members to hospital. Police have launched an investigation after the home of Circuit Court Judge Diane Goodstein, 69, roared in flames on Edisto Beach as her family, including her ex-senator husband Arnold Goodstein, was rushed to hospital.”

The price of used electric vehicles has come down to levels comparable with gasoline cars, a dynamic poised to boost their popularity despite the loss of a federal tax incentive for EVs, according to auto analysts. In August, the price premium for used EVs relative to used vehicles with a gasoline engine narrowed to just $897, on average, the smallest price gap on record, according to Cox Automotive. The average list price for used EVs was $34,704 in August, down 1.1% from July and 2.6% from a year earlier, it found. This price tag excludes a federal tax credit that...

I’ve recently been diagnosed with cancer. Now that I’ve got your attention, the prognosis is very good, with treatment I have a 95% chance of surviving it for 15 years. That doesn’t say I won’t croak of something else, but that it won’t be the cancer! It’s prostate cancer, very early detection (insert Public Service Message here, PSA test detected it when it was really small. Guys? Get one!). Lump confirmed by MRI, cancer and lack of metastasizing confirmed by PET scan. There are several treatment options, surgery, radiation, chemical castration, etc. I’ve ruled out the last one! I’ve already...

Lamenting Fox News' spinning Democrat narratives and "fake bad" polls against him, President Donald Trump suggested he's done with the "politically correct" network. "Fox should either get on board, or get off board, NOW, but at this point, it just doesn't make any difference to me," Trump wrote in a scathing rebuke Sunday on Truth Social. "They suck up the Ratings because of us, and then spin them in the Democrats' direction. "They refuse to put up Polls that correctly show me at 65% in Popularity, a Republican RECORD, but if I have a fake bad 'Poll,' many of which...

Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan’s podcast I’ve Had It has risen up the charts and created a community with ‘a brand of [expletive deleted] politics’When Donald Trump scheduled a press conference after a weekend in which rumors about his health swirled, two women in red-state Oklahoma launched a livestream for their more than 1 million followers on YouTube to speculate about the condition of “Cankles McTacoTits”, shortened to Canks “for expediency and spite”. It was fitting for the profanity-laced, straight talking liberal podcast I’ve Had It that quipped, after interviewing Barack Obama, that the former president has “big dick energy”....

US senators Charles Grassley and Richard Durbin have raised concerns about major corporations, including Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Cognizant, for filing thousands of H-1B skilled worker visa petitions even as they conducted large-scale layoffs of American employees. Other companies questioned include Amazon, Apple, Deloitte, Google, JPMorgan Chase, Meta, Microsoft, and Walmart. The inquiry comes amid high unemployment in the US tech sector, which exceeds the overall national jobless rate. Recent American graduates with STEM degrees are reportedly struggling to find jobs, prompting the senators to question why companies are replacing US workers with foreign visa holders, as per PTI...

According to sociologist Peter Berger, his discipline is “an intrinsically debunking discipline that should be congenial to nihilists, cynics, and other fit subjects for police surveillance,” and the popular suspicion of sociology is grounded in “a sound instinct for survival.” That quotation is found in historian Page Smith’s fine book, Killing the Spirit (1990). An example supporting Berger’s warning is a recent paper published in the American Sociological Association’s journal Sex and Sexualities, titled “Childhood Sexualities: On Pleasure and Meaning from the Margins.”Not surprisingly the paper’s primary author, Deevia Bhana, holds the South African Chair in Gender and Childhood Sexuality...