Free Republic

Iran completely rejected President Trump’s 15-point peace plan on Wednesday — and put forth its own maximalist demands to end the war.After the president claimed that Iran agreed to major components of his peace plan, including giving up their nuclear weapon ambition, Tehran told mediators that Trump’s plan was unacceptable, according to state media. Iranian lawmakers have instead presented their own deal that would see the Islamic republic rule over the Strait of Hormuz and ensure its safety, along with that of its terror proxies abroad. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has consolidated power within the remains of Tehran’s...

Do politicians internalize the consequences of their war-related votes? A new paper published in the Journal of Political Economy finds that they do -- when their family is involved. In “No Kin in the Game: Moral Hazard and War in the U.S. Congress,” authors Eoin F. McGuirk, Nathaniel Hilger, and Nicholas Miller compare conscription-related voting records of members of Congress with and without draft-age sons. They find that legislators with sons eligible for the draft are 7-11 percentage points less likely to vote for conscription than their counterparts with daughters of the same age. The authors compiled a dataset of...

"Why does he have to have a go at us?”The Kinks‘ Dave Davies has said he is “highly insulted” by Moby’s criticism of the band’s classic song ‘Lola’. The DJ and musician was recently interviewed by the Guardian, where he was asked to name a song he can no longer listen to. “’Lola’ by the Kinks came up on a Spotify playlist, and I thought the lyrics were gross and transphobic,” he responded. “I like their early music, but I was really taken aback at how unevolved the lyrics are.” The cult classic 1970 track famously features lyrics about...

Democrat Emily Gregory won a Florida special election on Tuesday, flipping a state legislative district that is home to Mar-a-Lago, the Palm Beach estate that President Donald Trump counts as his residence. The president had endorsed Gregory’s rival, Jon Maples. In a social media post Monday, he urged voters to turn out, saying Maples was backed “by so many of my Palm Beach County friends.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom praised Elon Musk as this generation's Thomas Edison — then accused the Tesla CEO of surrendering the electric vehicle market to China. "It breaks my heart," Newsom said on a new episode of "The Axios Show," describing Musk as "one of the great disappointments" of our time. Why it matters: China already holds 70% of the global EV market. Newsom argues Musk — the man who pioneered America's EV industry — is now accelerating that dominance by pivoting Tesla toward robotics. "I think this is Trump, not just Elon Musk," Newsom added, referring to the administration's...

I just ordered home heating oil... FIVE TWENTY-NINE A GALLON. I have (2) 330 gallon tanks. I thought I'd order 200 at 4.65 to tide me over until the price goes down, but today it is FIVE TWENTY-NINE. So I ordered the miserable 100 gallon minimum instead of paying over a thousand for 200 gallons. I love Trump, but this is unsustainable, and there should be no reason it is happening with the amount of oil we are producing domestically. I am P!SSED! If you have some snide insulting comment for me, blast away, but if you do that I...

A new US Congress study published last week on the THAAD ballistic missile interception system shed worrying light on the inventory of interceptors available to the US in the near future. The document says, "There is concern that the rate of use of THAAD interceptors during Operation Epic Fury has further reduced the limited stock of interceptors." Despite the problematic reputation that the THAAD system has acquired for itself over the past few years, during which it was deployed in the Middle East, Congress claims that the interception rate of the US system reaches about 90% of all Iranian ballistic...

One of the most persistent and dangerous lies circulating in today’s political discourse is the claim that any American confrontation with Iran-especially under President Donald Trump-is somehow a war “for Israel." It is a falsehood repeated so often that it has begun to calcify into conventional wisdom, echoed by media figures and political commentators who should know better, and some who simply don’t care whether it is true. Let’s say it plainly: this is not Israel’s war. It never was. It is America’s war-forced upon it by nearly half a century of Iranian aggression, bloodshed, hostage-taking, and ideological hatred directed...

If you want to weaken gerrymandering, avert government shutdowns, reduce the concentration of power among politicians, blunt the influence of money in elections, loosen the grip of national media narratives, lower the cost of running for office and give voters a stronger sense that their voice matters, there is a single structural reform for that. If Congress won’t revisit the Reapportionment Act of 1929, then the Supreme Court should. That century-old law’s obsolescence is responsible for many of the country’s most persistent frustrations. It gives rise to districts so large they feel abstract; campaigns so expensive they depend heavily on...

In history, authoritarian systems usually fall twice: first psychologically, when fear breaks; then politically, when the men with guns hesitate. Iran’s recent shocks look less like a single crisis than a classic collapse sequence unfolding at speed. The decisive moment in a regime’s collapse is often not the formal end, but the tipping point before it: the moment when the state’s aura of inevitability breaks. Borders may still be guarded, television may still broadcast, officials may still issue decrees. But something more important has changed. The system no longer functions with confidence. That pattern runs through modern history. Regimes die...

With its economy strangled by international sanctions, Iran is turning more than ever to the wealth hidden beneath its soil. And now, a stunning revelation: a colossal gold deposit has been found in the Shadan mine, located in the country’s eastern region. Estimated at over 61 million tons of ore, this find could reshape the balance of the global gold market. Iran’s subsoil is rich in untapped treasure. The nation is already known for its substantial gold resources—around fifteen mines are currently active. For a country hampered by years of economic restrictions, mining has become nothing less than a lifeline....

Heading into this midterm election year, the cost of health care tops the public’s economic anxieties and more than 4 in 10 voters say the issue will have a major impact on their vote, a new KFF Health Tracking poll finds. Voters, including independents, currently trust Democrats more than Republicans to address the cost of health care and most other health care issues, though neither party has an advantage on addressing the overall cost of living, the poll finds. A majority (56%) of the public expect health care costs for their family to become less affordable in the coming year....

The United States literally began with these words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” What that actually means, particularly the pursuit of Happiness part, is different for different people. At a minimum, however, we can all agree that Life means, well… life. The above, of course, comes from the Declaration of Independence. But that document doesn’t define the structure of our government, the Constitution does. And from the Constitution we get...

@BBCNewsnight "Men need to be perp-walked in handcuffs to the jail, and until we see that here in this country... we don't have a system of justice that's working." Republican Congressman Thomas Massie on whether survivors of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein will see justice done.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. – To conclude a lawsuit brought by Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys, the city of Louisville has agreed to pay $800,000 in attorneys’ fees for violating the First Amendment rights of photographer and blogger Chelsey Nelson. The fee settlement comes after the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky held Louisville accountable for violating Nelson’s freedom to speak messages consistent with her religious beliefs. ADF attorneys representing Nelson and her photography studio filed the lawsuit, Chelsey Nelson Photography v. Louisville-Jefferson County Metro Government, in 2019 because Louisville’s law threatened to compel Nelson to create photographs and blogs...

Former Minnesota Governor and ex-professional wrestler Jesse Ventura is now openly suggesting that President Donald Trump somehow faked the assassination attempt that nearly took his life in Butler, Pennsylvania just so he could look like a hero. In a disgusting display of disrespect toward the victims of the Butler, Pennsylvania tragedy, Ventura appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored to suggest that the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump was nothing more than a scripted wrestling “blade job.” In pro wrestling, a blade job (also known as “blading,” “juicing,” or “getting color”) is the intentional act of a wrestler cutting themselves, usually...

This episode spotlights glaring contradictions between Iran’s words and actions that completely unravel the “not a threat” narrative pushed in Western discourse. By walking through real evidence, official statements and strategic patterns, this breakdown teaches you how to spot propaganda, understand what a “threshold nuclear state” really means and why energy politics and misinformation campaigns are just as critical to the story as missiles and warheads...leaving you questioning not just Iran’s intentions, but who benefits from downplaying them.

No link. Just wondering. Hate to see it disappear.

Stephen Gardner and lawyer Peter Ticktin https://x.com/PeterTicktin , long time friend of President Donald Trump and lawyer to Tina Peters and Patrick Byrne on election integrity. The voter rolls are dirty and the machines have chinese phone parts to affect US elections. Tulsi Gabbard has all the info from Arizona, Georgia, Puerto Rico and more. Trump has been briefed on all of it, it must be used as soon as the Iran war is over to show the American people why we need no machines and clean voter rolls.

Ukrainian drones entered Estonian and Latvian air spaces from Russia overnight, with one hitting infrastructure and another crashing on land, Tallinn and Riga have said. The incident occurred around the same time as Ukraine launched a massive drone attack on the Russian port of Ust-Luga on the Baltic Sea, some 25km (15 miles) away from the Estonian border. The country's security police chief, Margo Palloson, said it was "a Ukrainian drone that deviated from its course, which was possibly affected in Russian airspace." Latvian Prime Minister Edgars Rinkevics also confirmed the drone that hit its territory was Ukrainian. Latvia's Defence...