Free Republic

War Secretary Pete Hegseth called for at least $350 billion in additional military funding and defended the Iran war as necessary while answering questions Tuesday during a Pentagon press briefing on the push to impeach him. "$350 billion, at a minimum, for reconciliation is what we believe is needed to make a generational and historic investment in this department, something our warfighters need," he said.

The Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration can resume building a border wall through the Big Bend region of West Texas. The justices voted 8-1 on Monday to lift a federal judge’s order that had stopped construction across the sector for more than a month. The unsigned five-page decision said a 1996 immigration law gives the Homeland Security secretary wide room to waive environmental rules and that Congress wrote it to favor fast construction over the harm the challengers described. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the only one who said she would have turned the administration down. She did...

Long before Beat Generation novelist Jack Kerouac immortalized the road trip or Americans got their kicks on Route 66, cross-country drivers had to navigate a confusing network of colloquially named thoroughfares to reach their destinations. Like pioneers of yore, motorists in the early 1910s could follow the National Old Trails Road—a transcontinental route between Baltimore, Maryland, and Los Angeles, California, stitched together from existing roads and historic wagon-train paths such as the Santa Fe Trail—or the Lincoln Highway, which connected New York City and San Francisco. As cars proliferated, so did demand for better roads. Countless automobile clubs, auto trail...

THE BUZZWe’ve all cleared a room, but clearing the roof is ambitious.Your digestive system has apparently been funding a space program.Turns out, those little daily contributions really add up.You know, farting is one of those things… it’s a little taboo and a whole lot of necessary. We’re only human, and as much as we try, we really can’t hold it in. So passing gas is about as normal and natural as breeze running through the trees. However, our breeze smells a bit worse.Now, the timing of a fart is when things get especially awkward. Like on a first date, for...

The United States will spurn a UN meeting on Tuesday where its human rights record under President Donald Trump was due to be examined, drawing criticism from rights groups who say violations have surged to levels not seen in decades. Washington disengaged from the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council last year, citing an anti-Israel bias, and this is the second year in a row that it has skipped its own review a process that even authoritarian regime take part in. The US no-show will likely mean the event is postponed until January, according to a draft UN document and diplomats....

Excavations within the medieval Great Church of Jesus in northern Sudan's Old Dongola uncovered a section of the original cathedral floor for the first time, according to an IFL Science report. Old Dongola was the capital of Makuria, a flourishing Nubian kingdom that converted to Christianity in the sixth century A.D. The cathedral once dominated the ancient metropolis, measuring 154 feet wide and 187 long, and standing over six stories high. It was one of the most monumental and important Christian buildings in Nubia, likely serving as the seat of the Bishop of Dongola, one of the most senior Christian...

It’s been heartwarming to see, once these contentious midterm elections were past us, how the Democrats rolled up their sleeves and got right to work on delivering the things they’d promised: affordability, equal opportunity and world peace. Haha, just kidding. Instead they immediately started seeking revenge. “We’re not afraid to impeach Donald Trump . . . who continues to act like a king or an emperor,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) declared after the Democrats’ big wins. “We have an absolute psychopath running the country,” agreed Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.). For all their “Love Trumps Hate” sloganeering, what we’ve seen from...

RFU News — Strategic Geopolitics Today, the biggest news comes from the Russian Federation. In central Moscow, security forces carried out a massive coordinated crackdown and detained up to two hundred people. Security forces were detaining anyone they came across on the street, reportedly including minors. According to eyewitnesses, those detained were beaten and taken to police stations. Detainees reported being held for hours without water or access to toilets, while their phones were smashed. Minors were later released to parents, though parents initially faced barriers to entry at the stations, leading to confrontations. Officially, Moscow’s Interior Ministry described the...

The fallout falls fully on the voters. They are wrong, and they foolishly voted against their own interests out of short-term outrage.I don’t blame President Trump for the terrible fallout of Election 2026. President Trump has done everything that he can to make America great again. This is going to offend some people, but I don’t blame the vast majority of candidates across the country, either.The fallout falls fully on the voters. They are wrong, and they foolishly voted against their own interests out of short-term outrage. Across the country, Americans chose to punish the Republicans by punishing themselves even...

A Texas county at the center of a 2020 election controversy and previously run by a serially accused potential fraudster overseeing machines for 90 Texas counties is lacking the necessary legal compliance. ... debate surrounding how one of the most solid Republican bastions suddenly switched blue in one election cycle. Some people pointed out the 20 million votes that materialized for Democrats across the country as fraud, and others argued that Democrats changed or exploited voting rules to register many U.S.-hating migrants. ... Texas, while requiring ID to register for voting, does not verify all registrants’ citizenship .. And there...

**Socialists Should Embrace Elon Musk, AI, and Robotics** For more than a century, the core promise of socialism has been simple: free people from the necessity of toil while still providing them with a high standard of living. The slogan has varied—“from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” “the end of wage slavery,” “leisure for all”—but the destination has stayed the same. Work becomes optional. Material security does not. History has been unkind to the political versions of that promise. Everywhere socialism has been tried as a governing system—Soviet Union, Maoist China, Cuba, Venezuela, and...

The Mainichi reports that another thirteenth-century shipwreck has been discovered off Takashima Island, after two others had previously been identified in 2011 and 2015. It is believed that all three vessels went down during the 1281 Battle of Koan, when the Mongol-led Chinese Yuan Dynasty attempted to invade Japan. The recently investigated ship originally measured around 100 feet long and was equipped with living quarters, likely serving as the mother ship of the fleet. Among the items recovered by archaeologists were five dice and 29 small cards used to play koppai, a game that originated in China. "The koppai cards,...

1-5 yrs: R+25 6-10 yrs: R+9 11-20 yrs: D+5 20+ yrs: D+5 (NBC Exit polls)

Ahmed Moor, a Palestinian American writer who was born in Gaza and worked in international development, on Monday became the first candidate for U.S. Sen. John Fetterman’s seat in 2028 — launching an early and progressive campaign set to reflect the polar opposite of Fetterman’s view of Israel and the war in Gaza.⁠

French President Emmanuel Macron and First Lady Brigitte Macron filed a personal federal defamation lawsuit against podcaster Candace Owens in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee.The fresh filing comes on the heels of an October 27 ruling by a Delaware superior court judge, who dismissed personal claims against Owens in an earlier July 2025 lawsuit due to a lack of personal jurisdiction, ruling that the court only had authority over her registered business entities.The sprawling 409-page complaint accuses Owens of repeatedly publishing defamatory claims regarding Brigitte Macron's identity and the couple's marital history, noting that she...

Saudi Arabia has sentenced a domestic worker from Kenya to 100 lashes after she gave birth outside of marriage. The sentence is a crushing blow to the mother, who has attempted for more than a year to return to Kenya with her child but has been blocked at every turn. The ruling, issued last month, shows the limits of a decade of social and legal reforms in the kingdom, where women can be jailed for 'illegal pregnancy'. The mother of five, Esther Wanja Muthoni, is among thousands of East African domestic workers who were recruited as housekeepers and nannies in...

Some countries have compelled Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly to include warnings or information about NAION, a rare vision-loss condition, on their GLP-1 drug labels. There is no NAION warning on the drugs’ labels in the U.S., though the Food and Drug Administration is investigating a potential link. Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly face lawsuits from patients claiming the medications caused the condition, but both companies are fighting the litigation.

Maybe somebody can explain this to me. What I have seen shows the number of Republican voters remained consistent with past elections going back several cycles. Slight increases and decreases here and there and the same holds true for democratic voters. If Christian voters stayed home in large numbers, as well as young men, there should have been a decrease in the number of Republican voters but the number of voters remained largely consistent. What we see is a sharp increase in democratic voters. 19+ million. Who are they> Where did they come from? Christian voters staying home cannot explain...

Everything is bigger in Texas. And that now includes the epic repudiation of Donald Trump by the American voters in the midterm elections. Yes, Republicans got pummeled in several conservative redoubts, including the loss of Senate seats in Kansas and South Carolina. But the biggest, most expensive and most stunning losses happened in the Lone Star State. After 32 years in the wild1erness, Texas Democrats won eight statewide races in a single day, including the thumping of incumbent governor and Trump ally, Greg Abbott, by Gina Hinojosa. They also won the lieutenant governor, attorney general, comptroller and three other offices,...

President Trump on Sunday said his deportation policies might have been “too tough” and contributed to the GOP’s historic losses in this year’s elections. CBS News’s Ross Douthat asked the president on “60 Minutes” if his immigration policy lost his party the midterms. “I think it both helped and hurt,” Trump responded. “I think I got an A-plus for closing up the border. I get very high marks for getting the bad ones out, but I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs that created one violation for breaking of the law, that was what they...